Water Quantity and Quality Issues in Mediterranean Agriculture - Water and Agriculture: Sustainability, Markets and Policies - page 61

There are two general policy approaches when dealing with the quantity problems
faced by Mediterranean irrigated agriculture. One is the traditional water policy approach
based on expanding water supply, and the other is the newly emerging approach based on
water management initiatives. These emerging initiatives rely on measures such as water
pricing, revision of water rights, abstraction limits on surface and subsurface waters,
development of regulated water markets, and re-use and regeneration of water resources. 3
These management initiatives appear to be better suited to solving irrigation scarcity than
new supply technologies, such as desalination (FAO, 2005).
A highly illustrative example of the conflict between these two approaches is to be
found in the type of solutions that have been considered for solving water scarcity and
degradation in south-eastern Spain. Two projects have been presented in the last four
years by the central government, both of them aimed at quantity rather than quality
problems. The first was the Ebro inter-basin transfer, which was subsequently replaced by
the new AGUA project. Both of these projects follow the traditional approach of
expanding supply with subsidised public investments, and both are questionable on
economic and environmental grounds.
Measures based on the new approach of water management initiatives require careful
application and a reliable information base, since the implementation of demand
management measures is a complex process that meets with resistance from farmers.
Banning aquifer overdraft is very difficult to achieve, since aquifers are a common pool
resource posing significant managerial challenges. Water pricing is also difficult to
implement because of farmers' opposition to price increases, lack of administrative
control on aquifer pumping costs, and non-response of water demand to water pricing in
aquifer areas with high-profit crops. Creation of water markets is another difficult task,
because institutional reforms require huge and persistent efforts, and because farmers
distrust such schemes.
Augmenting water supply in Mediterranean coastal areas by publicly financed
desalination is much more straightforward, but entails the problem of ensuring an
effective irrigation demand if water is not subsidised and farmers are obliged to face high
desalination prices. The impediment for the effective demand to materialise is that
farmers are extracting water from aquifers at pumping costs much lower than desalination
costs, so farmers will not buy desalinated water. Public investments in desalination plants
are only reasonable under a strict enforcement of an aquifer overdraft ban by the water
authority, which would force farmers to buy desalinated water.
The quality problems faced by Mediterranean agriculture are illustrated in the second
example presented here, which deals with agricultural nonpoint pollution abatement. This
example shows that nonpoint pollution control instruments cannot be accurately assessed
without a correct understanding of the key underlying biophysical processes. Neglect of
these processes may lead to adoption of incorrect policy measures.
The paper examines water quantity and quality issues in Mediterranean irrigated
agriculture, presenting empirical evidence from Spain on alternative policy options and
measures. We approach the quantity issue by evaluating alternative measures to solve
water scarcity in south-eastern Spanish basins, and the quality issue by ranking

3.

Goetz et al. (2005) present an example of water allocation among farmers with heterogeneous
yields, by using both uniform and sequential allocation rules developed from social choice
theory.