Economic Assessment of some Technologies used in Irrigated Agriculture and their Impact on Farmers' Livelihoods: Case of the Egyptian Salt-affected Soils Farms
Abstract: ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
• Egyptian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Egyptian Association of Agricultural Economics, Vol.(23), No.(3), Cairo, Egypt, September 2013.
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Salinity is a continuous challenge in Egypt because of the dry climate, and more salt being carried by the Nile River as a result of pollution, water shortage, seawater intrusion and human practices. Accumulation of excessive salt in irrigated soils of Egypt negatively affects crops’ yields, reduce the effectiveness of irrigation, deteriorate soil structure and affect other soil quality. This study was carried as part of the activities of the “Water and Livelihood Initiative (WLI)”. In this study, we hypothesized that farmers in the Salt-affected soils of Egypt grow crops at an economically efficient scheme, they efficiently use irrigation water and they can cope with soil salinity through using sustainable water-saving technologies and land conservation practices. This study aims to measure economic efficiency and water use efficiency for crops grown by the sample farmers, and identify sustainable water-saving technologies and land conservation practices they use to combat inappropriate soil conditions and poor irrigation management in the salt-affected land. The study used data of survey conducted in South El Husainia Plain (Egypt) in 2011/2012 to calculate some economic indicators. Empirical findings showed that growing wheat, clover, cotton and maize is promising in the study area. Therefore, farmers are encouraged to grow wheat and clover in winter whereas in summer, they are encouraged to grow cotton and maize since wheat and clover were the most economically efficient crops grown in winter whereas, cotton and maize gained the highest economic efficiency in the summer season. Clover and maize were the most profitable crops from water efficiency standpoints in winter and summer, respectively. Farmers in the study area use laser leveling, agricultural gypsum, sub-soiling, improved varieties and raised bed in their farms. Therefore, farmers are encouraged to adopt sustainable water-saving technologies and land conservation practices to overcome inappropriate soil conditions and irrigation management. Indeed, sufficient farmer’s access to knowledge and improving communication channels between the farmer and the agricultural extension, and skilled extension personnel on management practices relevant to salt-affected areas are of high importance to transfer such promising techniques to farmers in the study area.

Key words: salt-affected soils, irrigation water management, economic efficiency, water use efficiency, technologies, Egypt.
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URL
Publication year 2013
Pages 1225 - 1238
Availability location مكتبة معهد بحوث الاقتصاد الزراعي-7 ش نادى الصيد - مبنى الهيئات والشركات - الدقي- الجيزة (الدور الرابع)
Availability number
Organization Name
City Cairo
serial title Egyptian Journal of Agricultural Economics (المجلة المصرية للاقتصاد الزراعي)
Web Page
Author(s) from ARC
External authors (outside ARC)
    Ali A. Ibrahim Department of Agricultural Economics, Faculty of Agriculture, Zagazig University
    Boubaker Dhehibi International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)
    Aden Aw Hassan International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA)
Agris Categories Land economics and policiesProduction economicsWater resources and management
AGROVOC
TERMS		 Efficiency. Egypt. Irrigation water. Resource management. Technology. Water use.
Proposed Agrovoc Irrigation Water Management;Salt-Affected Soils;Economic Efficiency;
Publication Type Journal
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