Efficiency of Water Irrigation Use in the Surface Irrigation System in Egypt
Abstract: ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
• Egyptian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Egyptian Association of Agricultural Economics, Vol.(23), No.(1), Cairo, Egypt, March 2016.
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The economic exploitation of agricultural resources, especially for water resources, is one of the main goals of the Egyptian Sustainable Agricultural Development Strategy towards 2030 (SADS) to achieve sustainable agricultural development. Despite the limited water resources, but the efficiency of water irrigation use is low due to the immense volume of water losses through surface irrigation system, as well as the low efficiency of surface irrigation system as a result of excessive use of irrigation water.
Thus, the problem of the current study is present in an attempt to answer a series of questions namely; how big are the losses of water resources in the current surface irrigation system?; how can different indicators of water use efficiency in the current surface irrigation system be calculated?; and which crops are the most and the least efficient in terms of water use?
Consequently, the objectives of this study are mainly concerned with characterizing the losses of water resources in the current surface irrigation system, and measuring different indicators of water use efficiency in the surface irrigation system, and recognizing the most and the least efficient crops in terms of water use. To accomplish the study main goals, the study depended on descriptive and statistical analysis techniques e.g. technical and economic indicators to measure water use efficiency in the surface irrigation system.
The results showed four types of water losses in the current surface irrigation system in Egypt namely; aquatic weeds' losses, water balance losses, reservoir storage losses, and conveyance and distribution losses. The study revealed that high water-consuming crops (e.g. rice, sugar cane and long clover) realized the least efficient use of water irrigation and vice versa. These results drew attention to the importance of re-considering the current cropping pattern.
Accordingly, the study recommends re-considering the current cropping pattern, especially for high water-consuming crops; paying more attention to adopt and upscale new agricultural practices and technologies targeting improving water use efficiency and reduce water losses; and developing non-conventional water resources e.g. treated sewage water.
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URL
Publication year 2013
Availability location مكتبة معهد بحوث الاقتصاد الزراعي-7 ش نادى الصيد - مبنى الهيئات والشركات - الدقي- الجيزة (الدور الرابع)
Availability number
Organization Name
City القاهرة
serial title المجلة المصرية للاقتصاد الزراعي
Author(s) from ARC
Publication Type Journal
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