Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 11.
Challenges of Water for Food, People and Environment -
ICID's 1 Initiative on
'Country Policy Support Programme' (CPSP)
Mukuteswara Gopalakrishnan 2
Introduction
Water is increasingly becoming scarce with ever rising and unabated growth rates of
population, especially in developing and least-developed countries. Global food security
can be assured only when a sizeable number of countries with a large population in these
parts of the world can address to a meaningful extent their own national food security, if
there is enough scope with available land and water.
The water challenge, though, apparently focusses more on the bi-polar aspects of
water required for food production and water required for environmental security. It is
important to recognise the role of water for the people sector. This includes the avowed
water needs for drinking and other uses besides industrial needs. Both urban and rural
requirements form part of them.
In the first phase of CPSP studies, detailed assessments in two countries, viz. China
and India, were undertaken. Egypt, Mexico and Pakistan were also studied in a
preliminary manner. One basin each in Mexico and Pakistan were also subsequently
added using a similar approach; an intensive study of these basins and others was
deferred for a future plan. These five countries were specifically chosen for the ICID
studies because of the fact that they together cover 51% of irrigated area globally, and
affect directly about 43% of the world population.
The study undertaken looks at the development and management of water, land and
related resources, integrating the needs of various uses including vital needs of terrestrial
and aquatic ecosystems.
In order to enable a rapid examination of the impacts of various future scenarios, a
land and water use model, introduced with the acronym BHIWA, “Basin-wide Holistic
Integrated Water Management”, was developed. The aim was to handle an integrated
computational framework for a basin-level assessment of water resources, keeping in
view existing and other desirable options of water sector polices. This model was
developed to consider the entire land phase of the hydrologic cycle; it is capable of
1.
International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage - please visit the web page www.icid.org
for more details of ICID, its mission and goals and other details.
2.
International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage, New Delhi, India.
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