Water and Agricultural Competitiveness

State Confilicts - Water and Agricultural Competitiveness

Mon, Mar 30, 2009

My name's Duncan, I'm with the World Bank. I just wanted to know, I'm interested on the last question, to know, Peter, your involvement with Colorado, briefly, and to some extent there is state issues in the United States, so there's clearly state issues with places like [inaudible] in India. I just wanted, are there examples where these kind of state conflict issues are coming into play in China, as well? It's much harder to see these kind of issues because of the more, perhaps, top-heavy nature of the Chinese government at times, to be able to understand whether these issues are also at play in China, too.

As far as I can see, I think the most water conflict comes from Yellow River basin. So, for example, one of the provinces that we serve is Yinchuan [?] Province. Yinchuan[?] Province is the upper, is upstream on the Yellow River basin. And they got lots of water. But then, those provinces in the lower regions, like Hunan Province, [?] Province, they don't get enough water. So those provinces are fighting for water, every year. And they're trying to say, okay, we want the Yinchuan Province to save water, so to reallocate to lower ridge provinces. But then Yinchuan[?] Province says, okay, why do I want to save water? I don't benefit. Unless you give me some benefits of saving this water, otherwise I'm not going to do it. So that's one of the major water conflicts. And China's government is trying to use water rights to reallocate those water resources to resolve the problem. But the thing is that Ninjan [?] province would not want to give up the historical allocation of water. So how do you deal with those political issues? So that's one of the major problems in China.

And maybe, I would like to at least add something to that on, Maria Saleth was referring to. I've been involved in the Krishna? basin in southern India, more than other parts of India. And there you have, it's somewhat like a small Colorado River, you have three states sort of trying to share that water route. But you have these challenges around... this morning John was showing the lower, these old rice systems at the bottom of the river, but what has happened is the water has slowly moved up the basin, because you've had the cities developing, you have new agriculture developing, you've now got the sugar cane and the milk production further upstream being... and it's basically, although there are some institutional systems in place, they're not adequate to sort of manage that process. And now what we've seen in the last twenty years is, the large-scale infrastructure took the water off and used it for irrigation, but now in the last twenty years it's really been the small-scale interventions, small dams, wells, and that's kept the hydrology going down. And so the institutional structure that Maria Saleth was talking about, the reforms, this is the sort of thing that's very complicated, and politically charged. This tension that he was talking about is very politically charged in that situation. And I'll get back to my original point that I opened with, at the end it's the environmental flows that will end up... the cities will take it from agriculture; agriculture will eventually take it from the environment. So it's a really tricky process to try and manage, but I think the reality says we have to, this is where the challenges are, this is the way... Agriculture is an opportunity, but at the same time there are some very complex things that we have to keep managing. I think with that, I hate to be the person closing out the session, but I think we've covered many dimensions of the problem, and I'd just like to thank our three speakers for coming here and making the presentations. Thank you.

And Peter, thank you very much for your skilled chairmanship of this session.