Informal Irrigation

In my most recent post I highlighted some of the positives, but mainly negatives, of large formal irrigation schemes. There is an abundance of evidence to suggest that farmer-managed small-scale irrigation may actually be more efficient than large-scale formal irrigation schemes. These smaller schemes may be either community managed or managed by private companies who can then profit by charging a fee for the use of the water supply. Some of the main technologies used by communities to manage water supplies include:

• ·      Protected wells (covered to stop contamination)
• ·      Hand pumps
• ·      Rainwater catchment systems
• ·      Mist nets

All of the above innovations are simple enough so that communities who may have little education can understand how to operate them. The simplicity of the schemes means that future maintenance and operating costs. For example, hand pumps are free to operate once installed and relatively simple to fix if broken. As well as this, things such as mist nets which are cheaper and more achievable to install successfully should be favored to large projects which have a higher risk of failure and greater sunk costs if they do.  

Below is an example diagram of a rainwater catchment system. To put it simply, rainwater is collected and stored similar to as it would be in a reservoir. However, these catchment systems are much smaller in size. This means that individual farmers and communities may have their own system and hence their own source of water. In doing so, farmers are able to store water collected during times of sufficient rainfall for use during times of drought.

I used the example of the KRIP irrigation project in Nigeria in my last post to show how a large scheme may not be beneficial to an areas agricultural output. Looking at the same floodplain, it can be said that the informal development has had more success in increasing crop yields. The informally irrigated area of the Hadejia-Jama’are wetlands is greater than the area of land that is formally irrigated under KRIP. Because of this, and because farmers have the ability to allocate the optimum amount of water for the crops they are growing, crop yields are generally greater in informally irrigated parts of the Hadejia-Jama’are basin. Some examples of annual yields from the informally irrigated croplands include:

• ·      Wheat: 29,000 - 58,000 tons
• ·      Rice: 9,000 – 36,000 tons
• ·      Tomatoes: 14,000 – 17,000 tons

Compared to the following from the formally irrigated land under KRIP:

• ·      Wheat: 900 tons
• ·      Rice: 7,000 tons
• ·      Tomatoes: 33,000 tons

Another advantage of informal irrigation is that it requires far less government investment. There are far fewer sunk costs involved with farmer-led irrigation than with large projects such as KRIP, the most obvious being that it does not require the building of large dams. The relatively low cost of farmer-led irrigation techniques such as manual water pumps means that small scale irrigation has far more potential than formally irrigated land. Constructing dams so that all agricultural land across Africa can be formally irrigated would be unfeasible, and so most farmlands are not near dams. Hence, the InternationalFood Policy Research Institute found that the internal rate of return for formal irrigation projects was much lower than that of small-scale schemes. They reported a IRR of 7% for the larger schemes, compared to 28% for the farmer-led ones.

Small scale irrigation projects tend to naturally develop through the innovation of farmers and their need to increase crop yields due to increasing demand for food. Approximately 5.3 million hectares of agricultural land under irrigation in Africa, over half of this is privately irrigated with no government investment (World Bank,2000).

A growing number of African economies are encouraging private sector companies to invest in the agricultural sector, mainly in the provision of water. By inspiring farmers and communities to irrigate their land by themselves, productivity is likely to increase. The economic idea that the private sector is inherently more efficient than the public sector can be applied here. Private companies may own the rights to a water supply, and charge individuals and farmers to use it.

An obvious benefit of farmers being responsible for buying the water for their own land is that they are more likely to take care of it and irrigate it properly as they are complete stakeholders. For African farmers, their livelihood literally depends on their crop yield. Local labor being a constant presence means that maintenance issues can be dealt with as soon as they arise, rather than waiting for government services to repair damaged infrastructure such as water pipes. If private investors are also stakeholders, it is in their best interest to repair any damage as soon as possible so as to maintain their profits.

In a previous post, I mentioned reading about stunting on Bill Gates’ personal blog. His interest in hunger in Africa spans further, and his charity, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has funded research by the AgWater Foundation. The research concluded that by increasing private funding of community-led irrigation, there is potential to increase the productivity of farmland and hence the income and livelihood of the community. For example, farmers in Zambia who irrigated their land themselves rather than relying on formal schemes during the dry season had an income 35% larger than those who did not.