Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
4.1 I
NTRODUCTION
4.1.1
Background
The last 50 years have seen massive investments in large-scale public
irrigation infrastructure as part of a global effort to rapidly increase staple
food production, ensure food sufficiency, and avoid devastating famine.
Investments in irrigation accelerated rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, with
area expansion in developing countries at 2.2% a year reaching 155 million
ha in 1982. Global irrigated area rose from 168 million ha in 1970 to 215
million ha over the same time frame (Carruthers et al., 1997).
Large-scale irrigation has received the greatest share of public agricultural
investments in the developing world and most of the public operating
subsidies (Jones, 1995). Newly developed large irrigation schemes swallow
vast amounts of capital, both at the construction and at the operation
phases, and often require costly rehabilitations (sometimes after less than
five years of operation) (Diemer, 1988).
While these investments have yielded significant impacts in terms of
improving food security and poverty reduction in areas such as South-East
Asia and East Asia, the same cannot be said of sub-Saharan Africa
(Rosegrant et al., 2001; Hussain 2005). Literature (FAO, 2005) shows that
sub-Saharan Africa has the least developed irrigable land in the world (5.5%
of the potential).
Several reasons have been sought with regard to the low rate of irrigation
development in sub-Saharan Africa, and one of the reasons that keep coming
up is that large-scale irrigation schemes in sub-Saharan Africa have
underperformed resulting in lack of further investment into large-scale
irrigation (Chambers 1988; Merrey, 1997). This has generated debates on
whether large-scale irrigation is the best way for irrigation development in
sub-Saharan Africa (Wallace, 1979; Williams, 1988).
Diemer (1988) argues that the sum total of large-scale irrigation
expenditures often put a big question mark behind the economic viability of
the schemes. In most cases revenue has neither fully recouped the investment
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