Water and Agriculture in U.S. Foreign Assistance

Technological Improvements - Water and Agriculture in U.S. Foreign Assistance

Mon, Mar 30, 2009

Michael, building on that point, let's talk a little bit about the underlying technologies, on both supply and demand side. There are a lot of interesting new technologies. A lot of them were raised in the context of this morning's discussion. First of all, how far do you think these kinds of technological improvements can carry us? And we heard about drip(?) irrigation, above ground, underground, other kinds of smart technologies coming on line. How do you assess this? Where do you think it is, where is it going? And in terms of your own experience on the ground now, what are the key elements in play?

I think the irrigation efficiency can be improved quite a bit, but there are consequences if you just save the water and pass it to a junior water user. In the U.S., appropriation laws would actually make that water unavailable at the watershed scale. And so, one of the challenges we face is, as we become more and more efficient, the water that's applied is used completely, and there's no leakage into the system, which used to sustain some of these other environmental kinds of benefits that we gain. And we will need to think about how water can be conserved at a basin-wide scale, not just field by field, farm by farm. So that's a technology improvement, but it's also a challenge for us to kind of rethink how we manage and appropriate water. On the biotechnology side, we probably will gain maybe five or ten percent at the very most, from new crops, and new varieties that will save water or use saline water. But every five percent will make a difference, so I think that's a potential gain, but it's probably small in the long run. I think, in general, just conservation, and putting the right crops in the right places, will do a lot more for us to save water than what we can gain by biotechnology or even irrigation efficiencies.

Jim, would you like to add to that?

Sure. I was in Jordan from 2001 to 2006. And we had a fairly wide-ranging program in Jordan. We could do pretty much whatever we wanted. We had, we started demand management. The host country was opposed to demand management; the Minister said we don't want to spend money on this. He became a big supporter of demand management, and they reaped the benefits of that. We started a recycling. They said no, you can't do recycling, our water is too saline already, and you recycle and it will get more saline, and you won't be able to use this water for agriculture. Now they're big fans of recycling. And so, a lot of these things, new technologies, you have to be patient, you have to show them, you have to do pilots. And it's my experience, I mean we did something down in the Jordan Valley to show them if they just irrigated the root zone of the plant instead of flood irrigating and losing all that water down below the root zone, they save fifteen percent water, they increase their production by ten percent. And so, many things like that, you have to show people that this works, you have to convince them that other people are doing this for good reason, and you lead them and they recognize the benefits of the program and they get behind it. And then they become the person who thought of the idea.