Water Sector Policy Review And Strategy Formulation

This Athens Workshop helped to illustrate what needs to be done to manage water sustainably in agriculture, in particular through reviewing the experiences in OECD countries.

It is often assumed that upstream land use practices have important impacts on water resources and affect the downstream users at a watershed scale, Payments by downstream users to upstream users for "environmental services" such as good water quality, less sediments or more regular water flow are widely discussed. However, much controversy exists about the direction and magnitude of such impacts, how they influence the relationships between upstream and down-stream users, and which mechanisms allow for a sharing of resulting benefits and costs by all resource users in a watershed context. To address these issues, the FAO Land and Water Development Division organized the electronic workshop "Land-Water Linkages in Rural Watersheds" from 18 September to 27 October 2000. The present publication contains the proceedings of the workshop and two papers that set the stage for the workshop discussions. The complete workshop documentation, including discussion archive, background papers, and case studies, is included on the CD-ROM that accompanies the document.

Bringing contributions by a variety of authors together in one volume is part of an attempt to show that hydropolitics is a growing discipline in its own right. The prevailing definition of hydropolitics is widened to include the elements of scale and range. This is illustrated through a focus on theoretical and legal issues, case studies from Southern Africa and a proposed research agenda. The book is an important addition to the literature on hydropolitics.

Only 4 percent of arable land in sub-Saharan Africa is irrigated, using just 2 percent of the available water resources. Furthermore, 18 percent of the area equipped for irrigation is not utilized at all and the intensity of use varies between 50 percent and 80 percent. This highlights the huge potential available for intensifying and expanding irrigated area, provided that the investments required can be successfully mobilized. However, it must be noted that if investments in irrigation are to yield satisfactory returns, investments must also be made in a series of related activities. Current global figures for the amount of private investment in irrigation confirm that good returns can indeed be achieved. Prospects for sub-Saharan Africa would be far more favorable if public development assistance, particularly foreign direct investments, did not show declining trends.