Small is productive

How will the world find the water to feed a growing population in an era of droughts and water shortages? Can a resource like water be managed best by governments alone? Or can involving local community help?

A growing number of water experts are saying that the solution lies in forgetting big government-run irrigations projects with their mega-dams, giant canals, and often corrupt and indolent management. Farmers across the poor world, they say, are solving their water problems far more effectively with cheap Chinese-made pumps and other low-tech and off-the-shelf equipment. Researchers are concluding that small is both beautiful and productive.

In India, small-time rural entrepreneurs travel the countryside on bikes or donkey carts, with pumps strapped on the back. They rent the pumps for a dollar an hour, so even the poorest farmers can get some water from a local river or underground water reserve. In Burkina Faso in West Africa, pump owners supply a complete service, keeping small vegetable gardens irrigated for $120 to $150 per growing season. Of course, pumps need a power source, usually either electricity or diesel. But in India, some farmers are using dung from their cows to generate biodiesel. One Gujarati practitioner told IWMI researchers that dung-powered pumping saved him $400 a year in fuel.

Simple innovations are becoming a major driver of economic growth, poverty reduction, and food security, says the report, Water for Wealth and Food Security, published by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI). But much of the revolution is happening out of sight of governments and international organizations. In Ghana, for instance, small private irrigation schemes cover 185,000 hectares — 25 times more land than public irrigation projects, yet the agriculture minister hadn’t heard of these!

The 2000 report of the World Commission on Dams, set up by the World Bank, found that a quarter of dam-fed irrigation schemes watered less than 35 percent of the land intended, cost over-runs were almost universal, and a quarter of the irrigated fields were waterlogged or poisoned by salt.

Much like forests which were thought to be best protected by governments but now successfully involving locals, can water too be managed locally?