Water scarcity and abundance, water productivity and their relation to poverty - Water Scarcity, Livelihoods and Food Security - page 29

elsewhere). When legislation established formal water rights, the “reform
basically [dispossessed poor rural communities] from their current and future
claims to water” (PN66) (van Koppen, 2010).
Water access often has an upstream-downstream dimension. For example,
the proliferation of upstream small reservoirs in the Volta might threaten flows
into the Akosombo dam and the hydropower it generates. Project PN46 found
that “the collective downstream impact of the present number of small
reservoirs is minimal”; that “[even] after quadrupling the present number of
small reservoirs, their combined impact will be less than 1% of the total water
balance.” It concluded that the “reservoirs do not deprive downstream users
of the water for hydropower, agriculture, and environmental flows” (Liebe,
2002; Andreini et al., 2010).
Similarly, in Ecuador, Quito's water company planned to increase with-
drawals from the Quijos River to meet increased urban demand. This raised
concerns about lessened downstream flow and its consequences on economic
activity. Project Andes 2 showed that the middle part of the watershed receives
enough rainfall to replace most of the upstream withdrawals so that down-
stream activities would be little affected. Stakeholders will use this information
to negotiate appropriate levels of compensation (Quintero et al., 2012).
Finally, there has been a long-standing debate between upstream and
downstream countries in the Nile, over the effects downstream of upstream
development of hydropower and large-scale irrigation. A recent topic based
on a CPWF project concluded that “there is enough water to supply dams and
irrigate parched agriculture in all ten [Nile Basin] countries—but policymakers
risk turning the poor into water 'have-nots' if they do not enact inclusive water
management policies” (Awulachew et al., 2012a).
WP revisited
The CPWF proposal in 2001 defined low WP as an important problem (see
Chapter 1 for an overview of the creation of the CPWF and the activities of
the international water community). Indeed the objectives of many projects
approved in Phase 1 of the CPWF had as their primary objective to raise WP
of systems and sought to understand the reasons why WP was so low. Here we
revisit the concept of WP by examining how well the emphasis on it allowed
the CPWF to address its main objectives, that is, what did we learn about using
WP as an important indicator performance?
The first question is why WP and not some other measure such as land,
labor, capital or total factor productivity? While authors had noticed that WP
was not necessarily a factor that farmers could easily accept (Luquet et al.,
2005), at the time the CPWF was conceived, it was in response to a widely
held view that a global water crisis was looming. This was supported by the
address of the UN Secretary-General to the General Assembly in 2001 calling
for “more crop per drop.” Global population was forecast to increase by 50
percent by 2050 from the 6 billion reached in October 1999, and it was