This article is the third in a series of historical reviews on sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), exploring why agricultural production and irrigation schemes are underperforming, and how this contributes to ...high levels of food insecurity. The expression ‘food security’ emerged in 1974 following the Sahel and Darfur famines. Despite SSA being a net agricultural exporter, food insecurity has persisted and is increasing. This is largely a legacy of the export-oriented colonial agricultural production systems, which procured scarce fertile land, water and labour to meet the needs of industries and consumers in the Global North. Colonialism also undermined the social contract between traditional leaders and communities, which had been instrumental in managing food scarcity in earlier times. Post-independence, agricultural policies remained focused on exports and neglected critical research and investment: integrating food productions systems into the domestic economy; developing supply chains and associated market, storage and value-adding infrastructure; and introducing appropriate technologies. As a result, Africa is the only region in the world where increased export production caused a decline in per capita food production. African nations should be extracted from the debt accrued due to poor colonial investments, World Bank lending practices, and global currency and interest fluctuations, which have crippled their capacity to support agriculture and improve livelihoods and food security. Farming needs to be profitable, which includes farmers being connected to domestic supply chains and market signals, local value-adding, and post-harvest storage. This will create jobs and increase income earning capacity, which is the key to households’ food security.
This article explores the factors causing the current poor performance of most government irrigation schemes in sub-Saharan Africa. The literature review finds that the poor performance is not ...primarily caused by socioeconomic and biophysical conditions inherent to sub-Saharan Africa. African farmers have adapted to diverse biophysical conditions and expanded or contracted their area under agricultural water management in response to market signals. Rather, this poor performance is predominantly linked to the production systems introduced during colonialism and developments since independence, such as agricultural policies restraining rural economic development, unsuitable irrigation technologies and agricultural practices, and international lending practices and trade arrangements.
Utilizing survey information obtained from five irrigation schemes in southeastern Africa, we investigated the influence of agricultural innovation platforms (AIPs) and monitoring tools on a range of ...farm and household outcome indicators. Doubly robust estimation was used to measure the effects of these interventions, with a variety of other methods used for robustness checks. Involvement in AIP activities and using monitoring tools was found to be statistically associated with increased on-farm income together with an increased capacity to fund child education. Participation in AIPs also had a significant positive influence on off-farm income and reduced food shortages. Moreover, spillover effects were accounted for in the estimations and statistically significant positive effects were found regarding on-farm income for non-participants. These findings suggest that interventions with strong agricultural innovation system approaches in irrigation schemes in Africa could provide significant societal benefits.
This paper analyzes irrigator behavior in formal and informal water markets within an irrigation region of southeastern Australia to identify the extent to which these markets have facilitated the ...development of sustainable rural communities. The analyses show clear evidence that both the formal and informal markets have assisted irrigators in managing the significant adjustment pressure within the irrigation industry and the increased risk management burden placed on them by changing allocation policies. There is also evidence that many irrigators are active as both buyers and sellers and within both the formal and informal market, shifting their risk position within and between seasons and adjusting the allocation of their capital assets. All of these functions are essential to develop sustainable rural communities and retain community cohesion.
Governments in Australia are purchasing water entitlements to secure water for environmental benefit, but entitlements generate an allocation profile that does not correspond fully to environmental ...flow requirements. Therefore, how environmental managers will operate to deliver small and medium‐sized inundation environmental flows remains uncertain. To assist environmental managers with the supply of inundation flows at variable times, it has been suggested that allocation trade be incorporated into efforts aimed at securing water. This paper provides some qualitative and quantitative perspective on what influences southern Murray–Darling Basin irrigators to trade allocation water at specific times across and within seasons using a market transaction framework. The results suggest that while irrigators now have access to greater risk‐management options, environmental managers should consider the possible impact of institutional change before intervening in traditional market activity. The findings may help improve the design of intervention strategies to minimise possible market intervention impacts and strategic behaviour.
•A socioeconomic-biophysical framework of agricultural water management systems.•Six stages of development are identified: human’s early water use to the present.•Historical information demonstrates ...the complexity of systems and their impacts.•Understanding the interconnectedness of the system’s influencing factors is critical.•Policies must consider both positive and negative impacts of systems’ development.
While the earliest irrigation societies were relatively simple in their technical and social structures, they represent complex socioecological systems where human activities interact with the biophysical environment. Actions taken within any part of the system affect other parts, often with detrimental environmental impact. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework that explains how the socioeconomic and biophysical factors influence the development of agricultural water management (AWM). We categorize AWM developments into six distinct stages with increasingly complex interactions between the socioeconomic and biophysical components of the system. We argue that the failure of AWM developments across time and space, and within any stage of complexity, is a consequence of a lack of understanding of the interconnectedness within these complex systems and a lack of political will to acknowledge and investigate the failure, which allows both positive and negative effects to influence decision-making.
This paper analyses water market activities in an irrigation community in southeastern Australia during the first 10 years of operation, in order to establish the extent to which irrigators have ...become familiar with the use of markets and adopted the concept, and to identify factors impeding and driving the operations of markets for permanent and temporary water. These discussions are based on analysis of water right registers, trading registers, interviews with buyers and sellers of permanent and temporary water, and workshops with key stakeholders in the irrigation industry.
The analyses show increased adoption of water markets within irrigation communities and an increased understanding of their operations and advantages. It appears that irrigators are increasingly treating water as a commodity to be bought and sold on a seasonal basis depending on supply, demand and commodity prices. Markets for temporary water have achieved far wider adoption than markets for permanent water. The emergence of a water exchange within the study area has had a significant impact on this process, providing secure, reliable, fast and cheap water transfers. Differential tax treatment, significant policy uncertainty, the administrative complexity and cost associated with markets for permanent water and irrigators’ perceptions of water rights as an inherent part of their property, also are significant factors driving the preference for markets in temporary water.
Bid prices for the demand and supply of water allocations between 2001 and 2007, and average monthly prices paid for water allocations from 1997 to 2007 in the Goulburn-Murray Irrigation District are ...analysed to estimate price elasticities. Based on bid prices, the price elasticity of demand for water allocations appears highly elastic, with elasticities strongly influenced by the season and drought. The price elasticity of supply for water allocations is also elastic, albeit less elastic than demand. Using actual prices paid, water demand is negatively related to price and is inelastic, and appears to be most influenced by demand the previous month, drought and seasonality factors.
•A systems-thinking approach reveals under-analysed impacts of BCAs.•The method can analyse both the impacts of investments and investments required to achieve a targeted outcome.•Flow betweenness ...measures important impacts in a directional network.•Flow betweenness is an important metric for measuring network performance.
Benefit cost analysis (BCA) is frequently used to evaluate potable water infrastructure (PWI) investments. However, a limitation raised by BCA researchers is the narrow view of analysts in identifying investment impacts. In this paper, we propose a systems-thinking framework, supported by data from the literature, interviews, and macroeconomic data, to provide analysts with a more systematic and comprehensive view of investment impacts. The framework, once built, can be applied to any PWI investment question, to identify the prominent impacts that an analyst should consider taking forward through the quantification stages of the BCA process.
We validate our method for identifying impacts using data from New Zealand. Our method identifies impacts that are typically not valued in BCA of PWI investments, but that are a common impact of many types of PWI investment decision. Household costs, for example, score in the Top 10 investment outcomes, but are only typically valued in ex post analyses of outbreaks. These impacts warrant attention in future benefit cost analyses.
An additional contribution is the development a new betweenness importance rating, which we call flow betweenness, to evaluate each impact's prominence within the PWI socio-economic system.
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AbstractThis research explores potable water consumers’ willingness to pay to fund up-front investments in their potable water supply services (PWSSs), which will reduce rates in the longer term. An ...online survey of 1,970 New Zealand PWSS consumers was carried out in 2011 to identify factors that influence individual discount rates (IDRs) related to PWSS investments—a first of its kind—using dichotomous choice questions. Constrained latent class models (LCMs)—an established technique—were used to test the presence of a class of respondents that is unwilling to invest—a phenomenon that has not yet been tested for PWSS consumers. Confirming PWSS consumers’ IDRs will help water suppliers understand the factors more conducive to consumer support of long-term PWSS investments. The research showed that consumers have an 82% chance of having high discount rates of 45%–55%, and an 18% chance of always being likely to support initial payment increases in the interest of future savings. Decision makers should be aware of high IDRs, but they should recognize that there is a class of consumers that strongly supports long-term investments.
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