Water Quantity and Quality Issues in Mediterranean Agriculture - Water and Agriculture: Sustainability, Markets and Policies - page 64

Even under the currently binding Water Framework Directive, policy developments
in Spain show that water policy initiatives continue to be based essentially on the
traditional approach of expanding water supply. The recent Ebro water transfer project
and the new AGUA project highlight the weaknesses of this traditional approach.

3. The rise and fall of the Ebro water transfer

The Ebro inter-basin project was intended to solve the acute water scarcity and
resource degradation of south-eastern Spanish basins. The nominal costs of this project
came close to 5 billion euro for transferring 800 hm 3 a distance of up to 750 km, from the
Ebro basin to the Júcar, Segura and Sur basins of south-eastern Spain. 8 The Ebro transfer
met with strong opposition from water resource experts, environmental and social
organisations, and the Aragón and Cataluña regions located in the Ebro basin. 9 The main
argument raised against the Ebro transfer was the need for new policy initiatives based on
reasonable management measures.
Research was undertaken by our team to evaluate alternatives to the Ebro water
transfer. 10 The evaluation is based on a model that incorporates a large quantity of
technical and economic information specified at the county level. The model is used to
simulate several water supply and demand policy scenarios. Details on the model
specification, parameter estimation procedures, and simulation results are presented in
Albiac et al. (2002a, 2002b, 2003 and 2006).
The study covers thirty-five counties of the south-eastern Iberian Peninsula, all of
which receive water from the Ebro transfer in the Júcar, Segura and Sur basins (Figure 1).
The objective function maximises quasi-rent from irrigated cultivation activities, and the
constraints represent land, water and labour resource availability, considering irrigation
and labour by month, and irrigation acreage by type of crop and irrigation technology
(fruit-trees, vegetables and cereals, under surface or drip irrigation). The year of reference
for all technical and economic data is 2001, and the baseline data on acreage, water use
and revenue are presented in Table 2.

Water management scenarios
Several water management alternatives are examined to solve water scarcity in south-
eastern basins. In the first scenario, groundwater overdraft is forbidden and there are no
additions to the existing water supply. The second scenario involves increasing water
prices to the level required to balance demand with available resources. This scenario
follows the “close to full cost recovery” principle of the Water Framework Directive. The
third alternative is to expand water supply with water transferred from the Ebro, linked to

8. An additional volume of 200 hm 3 was planned to be sent 180 km north to Barcelona.

9. Economic and environmental arguments on the transfer can be found at

www.mma.es/agua/informes.htm , with the opinions provided by a large number of experts at the
request of the Spanish Ministry of Environment. A comprehensive assessment of the degradation
of the Ebro Delta and the fluvial and marine ecosystems, as a result of the transfer, can be found
in Ibañez and Prat (2003) and Prat and Ibañez (2003).

10. The research effort was supported by both the former central government, which proposed the

transfer (contract 21.803-480/8511), and the government of Aragón, which opposed it (contracts
OTRI-UZ 2003/0206-0374).

￿￿