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WATER SCARCITY IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIESReconciling Development and Environmental Protection

A round table discussion sponsored by the

Environmental Defense Fund and

Winrock International

March 4, 1993

Deborah Moore and David Seckler, editors

Winrock International Institute for Agricultural Development

1993

Copyright 1993 by Winrock International Institute for Agricultural Development

1621 North Kent Street, Suite 1200

Arlington, V A 22209 USA

All right reserved

Printed in the United State of America

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 93-07255

ISBN 0-933595-80-8

Contents

Abbreviations................................................................................................................ 4

Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................ 5

PART 1. SUMMARY

Summary / Deborah Moore and David Seckler.......................................................... 9

PART 2. PROCEEDINGS

Introduction / Mike Rock ............................................................................................ 21

Welcome / Robert Havener........................................................................................ 21

Water conservation and water development: Demand side / Deborah Moore ....... 22

Water conservation and water development: Supply side / David Seckler ............. 26

Discussion................................................................................................................... 30

Group reports.............................................................................................................. 45

Discussion continued.................................................................................................. 49

Participants ................................................................................................................. 79

Abbreviations

ADB

ADC

CGIAR

EDF

EPA

GDP

IDA

IIMI

IRRI

NGO

OECD

USAID

USC

Asian Development Bank

Agricultural Development Council

Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research

Environmental Defense Fund

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Gross domestic product

International Development Association

International Irrigation Management Institute

International Rice Research Institute

Nongovernmental organization

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

U.S. Agency for International Development

University of Southern California

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the members of the workshop coordination and planning teamconsisting of Mike Rock of the Institute for International Research, and Vicki Walkerand Chris Wozencraft of Winrock International. We are also grateful to Steven Breth,Winrock International, for producing this publication.

Deborah Moore and David Seckler

Part 1. Summary

Summary / Deborah Moore and David Seckler

Earth is the water planet—almost 70 percent of the earth's surface is covered by water.Indeed, water is the essence of life for people, plants, animals, and ecosystems alike.Adequate water supplies are critical for development of drinking water supplies, agri-culture, and industry, but water scarcity and pollution crises are ignored around theworld.

Despite enormous expenditures by national governments and international aid agencieslike the World Bank, supplying water for food production, drinking water, fisheries,and environmental protection has not kept pace with population and economic growth.The loss and degradation of rivers, lakes, wetlands, and other water-dependentecosystems around the world has been the result, along with declining human health.In addition, large amounts of precious fresh water are wasted or are dissipated in verylow value uses. The question becomes, "Is there enough water to go around?"

The conventional approach to meeting new water demands has been to develop newsupplies by building large dams. However, such dams have become very expensive,they destroy aquatic habitats, and they often displace local communities. If we are tosucceed in fulfilling human needs for water, we must find means to do so that arecompatible with maintaining water-dependent ecosystems and with respecting localand indigenous communities' needs. Therefore, another question is, "What are themeans of supplying water in environmentally sustainable ways, and how can we shiftour investments and policies to support these means?"

On March 4, 1993, the Environmental Defense Fund, a U.S.-based nongovernmentalenvironmental advocacy group, and Winrock International, a nongovernmental re-search and policy institute focused on development issues, convened a 1-day roundtable discussion of researchers and policy advocates to try to answer these questionsand find solutions to water scarcity problems in developing countries that reconcile thegoals of economic development with environmental protection. The purpose of themeeting was to take the first step toward bridging several gaps we perceived betweengroups and interests involved in the field of water resources management. Researchand advocacy organizations are often working on similar issues, but with differentstrategies that may or may not be complementary. We hoped to begin building a bridgebetween the development community and environmental community working on solu-tions to water scarcity, particularly in developing countries.

By bringing together experts from different communities that do not often communi-cate with each other, namely research and advocacy organizations, we hoped to betterunderstand the opinions, positions, and priorities regarding strategies to combat waterscarcity. During this meeting, we had the opportunity to introduce each other to ourwork in this field and to identify areas of agreement and overlap where there may besynergism. We wanted to make the developmentalists aware of environmental and so-cial equity considerations, and we wanted to make environmentalists aware of eco-nomic and development considerations. We wanted to generate a list of the barriers or

10 Water Scarcity in Developing Countries

obstacles constraining the achievement of improved water management and to specifyinstitutions and policies that need reform.

There are several opportunities where a broader consensus and constituency will beuseful. For example, the World Bank will soon complete its water resources policystatement, which is intended to guide its investments in water over the next fewdecades. Comments from outside the bank will be needed when it develops regionaland country strategies for implementing the new water resources policy. Similarly, theWorld Bank is embarking on a process to create an agriculture policy. The SustainableAgriculture for Rural Development program of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organi-zation is also getting under way. Finally, the U.S. Agency for International Develop-ment is continuing to re-think its involvement in the water sector. All of these effortsprovide opportunities for the research, advocacy, development, and environmentalcommunities to work together toward common goals. A preliminary scoping of therange of positions and strategies is necessary, however, before such collaboration canbegin in earnest.

We are publishing the proceedings of this meeting to further facilitate a dialogueamong the various interests that are working to solve water scarcity problems with thehope that together we can formulate consensus on appropriate priorities and strategies.This summary of the meeting covers the main points made by participants, the priori-ties identified, and the areas of agreement and disagreement about appropriate strate-gies to combat the problems identified.

The format of the meeting included two overview presentations to define the area ofdebate over trends in global water supplies and demands, the potential of water con-servation and re-use to meet new demands, the need to develop new water supplies,the importance of protecting aquatic ecosystems, the role of international institutions,and the prospects for policy reform and innovative approaches. The overviews werefollowed by open discussion of the issues presented. Four small working groups thenidentified priorities for research and advocacy during lunch. The afternoon was spentdefining strategies to address the priorities identified.

Overview of the debate: How to meet new demands for waterwithout sacrificing the environmentThe world's ability to supply water in adequate quantities and of adequate quality nowand in the future depends on many factors: the amount and rate of change in waterconsumption of the global population; global food requirements; precipitation patternsand impacts of global climate changes; the amount of water needed to maintain rivers,lakes, wetlands, and water quality; and the technologies and policies societies chooseto manage their water supplies. Our debate centered around the potential for water-useefficiency and conservation improvements to save enough water to meet new humandemands and to satisfy environmental needs for water. Related to this central theme,various opinions were expressed over trends in food supplies and urban water uses, theneed to develop new water supplies, the advantages and disadvantages of water pricingand water marketing, the effectiveness of conventional versus indigenous and alterna-

Summary 11

tive approaches to irrigation and water management, and the relevancy of the experi-ence with conservation in the energy sector. Many participants were interested in for-mulating consensus around the issues of large dams versus small dams and of findingviable alternatives to large dams, in large part because of a desire to change the priori-ties and investment strategies of international aid and development institutions like themultilateral development banks. Significantly, we found that there is widespreadagreement over the goals of satisfying human needs for food, water, and economic op-portunities while simultaneously maintaining the viability of water-dependent ecosys-tems and environmental quality. However, there is still considerable debate over theappropriate means or methods of reaching these goals.

Deborah Moore, staff scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, presented an op-timistic case that future human needs for water could be met without sacrificing envi-ronmental quality through greater emphasis on water-use efficiency and conservation,particularly in the irrigation sector, through transfers of water from irrigation to urban,industrial, and environmental uses, and through new sustainable alternatives to con-ventional large-scale water development. Ms. Moore identified the lack of local publicparticipation, vested political and economic interests, and inadequate financing of, andresearch on, alternatives as the primary obstacles to shifting to a sustainable approachto managing water resources. She recommended changing the investment and pro-curement strategies of the multilateral development banks that fund water projects toensure that all alternatives and views are considered in the project and policy designprocess.

David Seckler, director of Winrock International's Center for Economic Policy Studies,presented a more pessimistic case that human needs for water may outstrip suppliesdespite efforts at conserving existing supplies as well as developing new ones. Dr.Seckler discussed the "illusion of water conservation," or the difference between in-creasing water-use efficiency at the project level versus saving water that was previ-ously consumptively lost to the system as a whole. He identified environmental needsas one of the biggest constraints to satisfying human demands for water and arguedthat water conservation and new technologies will not substitute for large-scale damsin the long term. Instead we will need to utilize all the available options, includingconservation and small-scale projects, as well as conventional large-scale projects.

The following sections describe the primary areas of debate, issues raised, and conclu-sions reached.

Water conservation and reallocation: Are the savings an illusion?A central question in developing a new approach to supplying water is whether thesavings from efficiency improvements and conservation activities are real, i.e., do thesavings represent a new quantum of water that can be supplied for another use? Forexample, if drip irrigation technologies are used instead of flood irrigation, how muchwater is saved that did not previously return to the river or aquifer, and can this savedwater be transferred to another consumptive use?


In the discussion, this question was defined as the difference between project effi-ciency and basin efficiency, or the difference between "wet water" and "dry water"savings, or the difference between saving water previously returned to the system(return flows) and reducing consumptive losses. Many examples were given whereimprovements in one irrigation use simply deprives an adjacent irrigation use that de-pends on that "waste," such as in Egypt's Nile River basin. It is true that water is neverreally lost-it reappears as groundwater recharge, return flow to a stream, or evapora-tion to the atmosphere. However, it is also true that water that is wasted may not reap-pear in the same system. It may be lost through surface and subsurface flows to theseas or deep percolation to aquifers, return to the stream in lower quality, evaporate be-fore reaching the crop, or be used for a product worth less than the cost of supplyingthe water. In addition, flows in the stream may be excessively depleted if more water isdiverted than is really required for the particular use, such as crop production. Finally,there are measures that can cut the consumptive use of water, such as switching fromwater-intensive crops to crops with lower water requirements.

The concern raised over relying on water conservation and efficiency improvements,especially in the irrigation sector where most of the world's available water suppliesare used, is that the gains will not be enough to keep pace with increasing demand forwater and food in the longer term. In addition, some participants were concerned abouttaking irrigated land out of production to transfer the water to satisfy growing urbanand environmental water demands, at the same time that demands for food require in-creasing the lands under irrigation. There were a few participants who believed that"efficiency improvements" produce almost zero real water savings.

While agreeing with the necessary distinction between wet water and dry water sav-ings, most participants recognized that there are many environmental benefits to re-ducing the amount of water necessary to deliver to a farm or a city. Environmentalbenefits include increasing the amount of water remaining in a stream reach, enhanc-ing low stream flows during critical periods, and improving water quality by reducingpolluted return flow. In addition, in some cases the water saved may be enough to sub-stitute for a new dam or imported water. Water conservation technologies can also befar cheaper than new infrastructure programs.

So, the ultimate questions remain: How much water can be saved, and is it enough tosatisfy the projected new demands? Therefore, while there was considerable disagree-ment among the participants over the details of gains from conservation and efficiencypotentially available in specific localities, the consensus was that reducing waste andimproving efficiency has potential to reduce the costs of new water supplies andwastewater treatment, to make more water available for other non-irrigation uses, andto reduce diversions of water from rivers, lakes, and wetlands. There was also a lot ofdiscussion about the true nature of future food demands. If the estimated doubling indemand for cereals is too high, then the result could be the development of surplus ir-rigation capacity at great socioeconomic and environmental expense. If, on the otherhand, the estimates of the potential to change the nature of food demand from meat tograins are not correct, then we may risk retarding the necessary agricultural develop

Summary 13

ment and causing hardship and environmental damage as water is diverted to other

uses.

There was general agreement that more data collection, monitoring, and research wasneeded to better quantify and separate the net savings due to efficiency improvementsfrom the uses supported by return flows, groundwater recharge, and in-stream flowenhancement, among others. Furthermore, to ensure that all of these linkages and inter-dependencies are considered, participants agreed that the appropriate unit for evalua-tion is the hydrologic basin or watershed.

Efficiency gains in the energy sector: Are they analogous in thewater sector?While many acknowledge that water scarcity has the potential of becoming the next"oil crisis," the lessons learned from the energy sector about increasing productivitywithout increasing supplies have not been fully applied in the water sector. Despitesignificant physical differences between water and energy, the analogy is worth ex-ploring further. For example, since 1973, GNP in the U.S. has grown while energyconsumption has remained stable until the last few years. The story for water use in theU.S. is similar, particularly in the industrial sector. For those interested in promotingeconomic development, it is critical to look at ways of increasing the economic output,whether industrial or agricultural, with the water available. This involves using watermore efficiently, as well as making social and economic choices about the most appro-priate and beneficial use of limited water supplies.

The two historic drivers in energy policy have been the price of energy and nationalsecurity issues, particularly related to oil. Soaring energy prices in the mid-1970s madeconservation economically competitive. In addition, the rising capital costs of buildingnew power plants, especially nuclear plants, as well as public opposition and new envi-ronmental regulations made construction of new plants extremely expensive. Further-more, the political costs of reliance on foreign oil supplies made developing alternativesources of energy, including efficiency improvements, more attractive. So, substitu-tions were made, technological innovations were developed, and consumer habits werechanged, with the result being greater economic output for the same energy use.

In the water sector, prices have not yet risen to the level where they are driving con-servation. However, limits on supply and water quality are forcing substitutions in theindustrial sector. The economics of large dams, as well as growing public opposition,is beginning to force water supply entities into examining alternative options moreclosely. By obviating the need to build new dams and water diversion projects or byreducing the capacity required, water conservation and water-use efficiency improve-ments can help protect remaining river and wetland environments. A final similaritywith energy is that many countries are experiencing rising tensions over their relianceon foreign sources of water. The Nile River basin between Egypt and Sudan is one ex-ample, and others can be found throughout the Middle East. The political and militarycosts of maintaining foreign water supplies may make the conservation of existing in-ternal supplies more attractive.


Many differences between water and energy were outlined, as well. In energy, the en-ergy wasted is truly lost or dissipated as heat. With water, on the other hand, somewater is lost to evaporation, but the balance can end up downstream supporting someother use. There is only a net benefit if the use of the water saved is more valuable thanthe previous use supported by the "wasted" water downstream. Some participants be-lieved that there are few factor substitutions for water that can be made, particularly inthe irrigation sector, without sacrificing yields. Others believed that there are substitu-tions or choices that can be made in the irrigation sector that would significantlyreduce the consumptive use, such as switching crops and improving irrigation schedul-ing. Finally, the consequences of raising water prices substantially, and hence possiblyraising food prices, may be detrimental to human welfare.

Despite such physical differences, however, the processes that have led to changes inthe energy sector, and the extent to which there are parallel processes in the watersector, are worth examining further if we are to develop a strategy to influence institu-tions, technologies, and economic and environmental policies.

Large vs. small projects: Is there a clear preference?During the last decade or so, the construction of large-scale dam projects (over 250feet high) has become increasingly controversial for social, environmental, and eco-nomic reasons. A famous example is the World Bank-financed Sardar Sarovar Dam inIndia, which was projected to cost more than $5 billion, to adversely affect severalhundred thousand people, to inundate 25,000 hectares of forest and agricultural lands,and to harm fisheries downstream. The benefits were to produce 415 megawatts of hy-dropower, to irrigate 1.9 million hectares, and to provide drinking water to hundreds ofthousands of people. After years of substantial worldwide public opposition to theproject, the Government of India recently asked the World Bank to stop financing theproject because it could not meet the environmental and resettlement conditions thebank had imposed.

Opponents of large dam projects want to find alternative means of providing the nec-essary water and power supplies that will have fewer social and environmental im-pacts - options such as conservation, transfers, small-scale irrigation, and enhancingrainfed agriculture. Proponents of large dams, on the other hand, believe that the alter-natives are not substitutes for large dams, but rather complements that will not work inmany situations. The challenges are to develop greater consensus regarding (1) themechanisms to make the alternatives feasible, thereby limiting the need for more largedams, and (2) the conditions under which large dams may be acceptable, if thealternatives are found not to be feasible in a particular case.

Participants who defined themselves as primarily in the development community be-lieve that large dam projects provide more carryover storage necessary to supply waterthrough long dry periods than do small dams. Some argued that the economic returnsfor large projects are more favorable, although many internal evaluations of WorldBank-financed large dams show fairly dismal economic results. In addition, for largeprojects, the opportunity cost of capital and the long time required for construction

Summary 15

before benefits begin to accrue make the financial investments huge and risky. Finally,most participants agreed that fewer large projects are easier to manage than hundredsof smaller projects from the perspective of a government or an international institutionlike the World Bank.

The participants from the environmental community tended to prefer small projects,while agreeing that there are currently many unknowns and disincentives surroundingsmall-scale projects and other alternatives. Smaller projects have shorter implementa-tion time frames, thereby producing benefits sooner and freeing up capital for otheruses. There was not agreement that large projects are more cost-effective, since manytraditional and indigenous technologies for irrigation and watershed development arequite inexpensive. In addition, such community-based knowledge of the water systemmay optimize many local conditions of which outsiders are unaware, such as resolvingcommunity conflicts over water rights. While some small-scale projects may not becheap, the risk of making a very expensive mistake is smaller than with a large project.Furthermore, although the relative gains in efficiency or productivity from a small irri-gation or rainfed agriculture project may be small compared to their large-scale coun-terparts, the smaller gains may be spread over a wider area resulting in substantialabsolute increases in production. Finally, there are many non-monetary benefits tosmaller, community-based water and agriculture projects, including developing localinstitutional capacities, management skills, and self-reliance, as well as having smallerenvironmental impacts and providing benefits that are more equitably distributed.

The debate over large-scale versus small-scale water projects, led the participants todiscuss the assessment process needed to better evaluate both the large- and small-scale approaches. Clearly, improved public and community participation in designing,implementing, and managing projects is required in all projects. Often, indigenousknowledge may be more amenable to a smaller scale approach. In addition, financialand economic accountability and transparency need to be created in the decision-making process. In this way, alternatives to large dams will be given equal con-sideration and validity in the evaluation process. The evaluation also must considerdownstream environmental effects and incorporate measures to eliminate or reduce,not just mitigate, such effects. Similarly, compensation for affected communities andindividuals must be included in the assessment. Lastly, the evaluation process shouldbe based more on probabilities, or actual track records of the particular institution withlarge projects, than on possibilities or hoped-for results. Perhaps some kind of riskassessment that includes environmental and social risks can be utilized.

From the discussion, there still appear to be many differences in opinion and emphasison the preference for large-scale versus small-scale water projects. Agreement contin-ues to break down over the economic costs and benefits of the respective approaches,the relative importance and values associated with social and environmental upheavalsfrom large-scale projects, and the feasibility of the alternatives to fulfill human and en-vironmental needs. While no clear consensus emerged, agreement was reached overthe need for better information, for equal and fair treatment of alternatives in the deci-sion-making process, for greater and more productive public participation, and for the


improved evaluation of the economic, social. and environmental risks of large-scaleprojects.

Institutional change: What are the opportunities and constraints?Much of the day's discussion focused on technical issues related to quantifying thesavings or gains from a particular type of technology or approach. However. all theparticipants recognized explicitly that the root of the problems lies with institutions.political will, and, ultimately, people. The solutions, then, must be found in the sameplaces. The difficulty is in identifying the barriers, constraints, and disincentives tocreating the change and policy reform needed to solve water scarcity problems. Al-though institutional problems exist at all levels - local, regional, national, and interna-tional- our discussion tended to focus on the role of international institutions.

All the participants agreed that the international aid institutions and multilateral devel-opment banks play an enormous role in setting the direction for development projectsbecause of the substantial financial resources they have. There is a great pressure tolend within the multilateral development banks that favors project quantity over pro-ject quality. The recent internal evaluation of the World Bank's investment portfolio,the Wapenhans report, substantiates this assertion. In addition, there are significantvested interests both within developing and developed countries that stand to benefitfrom the status quo. For example, the procurement process in projects financed bymultilateral development banks favors firms from industrialized countries. Indeed,more money returns to some industrialized countries, such as Switzerland, in the formof procurement contracts, than is disbursed to some developing countries, such asBangladesh. Furthermore, because many small-scale and local projects are more diffi-cult to manage from afar, there is little incentive to change the top-down managementstyle or to experiment with different financing mechanisms.

The mechanisms to influence the multilateral development banks and international aidinstitutions are often based on politics, not on technical arguments. For advocacy orga-nizations, dealing in the political realm is part of the strategy and approach, whereasfor researchers who must maintain objectivity, politics can compromise their credibil-ity. Advocates have a desire and responsibility to be technically credible, as well.Among the participants who are researchers, there was a strong concern that becomingmore vocal with their criticisms of particular institutions or specific projects based ontheir research would not only affect their credibility, but would also endanger their ac-cess into certain countries, risk their relationships with government agencies, and un-dermine their funding bases. However, the researchers also recognized that pressure onthe international institutions must be brought to bear from the inside as well as fromthe outside.

The participants from advocacy organizations were not necessarily asking researchersto become advocates, but rather to bring their expertise to bear on questions and issuesraised by the advocacy community, as well to better share the results of the researchwith those who can bring the findings into the decision-making process. The advocatesbelieved that outside pressure was critical for influencing these large institutions,

Summary 17

which are accountable to no government or international law. Furthermore, the advo-cates did not see the management difficulties associated with evaluating and fundingnumerous small projects as insurmountable. Rather, they saw the inflexibility and re-sistance to experimentation of World Bank staff and management as obstacles.

While there was not necessarily full agreement on the types of influence and reformthat is needed in international aid institutions, there was agreement that better coordi-nation among donors is necessary, that guidelines for evaluation, consultation, and par-ticipation are needed (such as those suggested for dam assessments, above), and that alevel playing field must be ensured in decision making. Some participants felt that themultilateral development banks have already made substantial changes concerning en-vironmental protection, large dams, and social concerns. But others cited examplesthat the investment strategy, despite changes in rhetoric, is essentially unchanged. Al-though there was a general belief that the priorities of the multilateral developmentbanks need to come from the outside in response to local and national needs, there wasnot agreement on what those priorities for investment should be, whether for develop-ment of new water supplies or for conservation of existing supplies.

Developing strategies for sustainable water managementThe meeting succeeded in encouraging participants to raise issues and outline theirconcerns. At this stage in bridging the gaps between the environment and developmentcommunities, few conclusions or agreements were reached on technical issues or in-stitutional reforms. Yet, the questions and differences were more clearly articulated,which could lead to more rigorous examination of the substance and specifics behindthe generalities.

The questions posed above as section headings point in the direction of additional re-search that is required before people can reach agreement on appropriate priorities andstrategies. These research questions include:

• Is conservation an illusion? There is an acute need, within a river basin, for betterquantifying the water withdrawals, consumptive uses, ecosystem needs, and net orreal savings from conservation and efficiency improvements that could be redi-rected to meet additional consumptive or ecosystem needs.

• Are strategies used in the energy sector relevant in the water sector? There is aneed to better determine the role that factors contributing to increased energy pro-ductivity-price, new technologies, input substitutions, supply limitations, publicopinion, and national security issues - can play in developing a strategy to pro-mote change in the water sector.

• Is there a clear preference between large versus small dam projects? There is aneed for side-by-side comparisons of the cost-benefit, cost effectiveness, opportu-nity costs, environmental costs and benefits, resettlement and rehabilitation costs,social and equity considerations, and community development aspects in large andsmall dam projects to better determine their respective merits and problems.


•

Guidelines should be developed for dam assessments and conditions under whichnew dams should be considered.

Can the constraints to institutional reform be overcome? There is a need to evalu-ate the incentives and disincentives--economic, political, social-to changingproject design, evaluation, procurement, implementation, and management withinthe international institutions. Meaningful public participation should be encour-aged. Relationships among researchers and advocates should be built to bettershare information and influence decision makers. Experimentation with new ap-proaches to irrigation, water conservation, ecosystem protection and restoration,and financing mechanisms should be promoted. Those involved in water policyshould recognize that pressure and ideas for institutional reform must come fromboth inside and outside the institutions. Ultimately, reform will require greatercommunication and collaboration between those on the inside and those outside.

This list of issues to pursue is by no means exhaustive. The participants discussed afew means of pursuing the debate started at the meeting. People favored the idea ofconvening small working groups to jointly pursue the answers to a few key questions,such as the first one regarding quantifying potential gains from efficiency. The resultsof such joint research could then be distributed to provoke further dialogue and debatewith other NGOs, researchers, and policy advocates, as well as with staff in interna-tional institutions such as the World Bank and USAID.

We expect to convene other meetings in the future to continue building a dialogue

about substantive issues.

Part 2. Proceedings

Introduction / Mike Rock

This workshop is the consequence of conversations among a small group of peopleabout building bridges between two cross-cutting kinds of issues and groups. The is-sues are along the development/environment continuum and the groups are researchgroups and advocacy groups. As many of you are aware, some in the research commu-nity, on the development side, and some in the advocacy community, on the environ-mental side, have been at loggerheads with each other. This manifests itself mostclearly around the issue of dams, particularly big dams in the developing world. But, italso manifests itself at more micro-levels in real differences over values. I don't meanmonetary values, but different values around the role of ecosystems and species.

While the debate at the Earth Summit in Rio last summer has moved us away from aview that saw environmentalists as stoppers of progress and developmentalists as de-stroyers of the environment, it is also clear that there is a continuing need for dialogue.That dialogue has to move away from macro issues to more micro-oriented issues suchas water. No matter what you think about the World Bank 1992 environment and de-velopment report,1 it put water scarcity and water quality at the absolute center of thedebate around environment and development. We hope this workshop will begin a di-alogue among groups with divergent views that are working on the issue of water andthe environment and development, particularly, but not exclusively, in developingcountries. What we hope at the grandest level will come out are answers to three sim-ple questions: (I) Where do we agree? (2) Where do we disagree and why do we dis-agree? (3) Is there anything that we want to do collectively about either our agreementsor disagreements? We hope that we can get some insights into these three questions.

Now let me turn to Bob Havener, who will set the stage.

Welcome / Robert Havener

You have left me a formidable challenge. It seems to me there are a few important is-sues that require the best minds that mankind can bring to the subject. One of these isconflicts over water. The riparian laws that used to guarantee rights and privileges ofwater that satisfied most of the people in the population, or at least appeared to, arebreaking down as pressures for access to water and concern about the utilization ofnatural resources for the benefit of all mankind become imperatives in a modern soci-ety where communications and the press play such a prominent role.

1 World Bank, World Development Report 1992: Development and the Environment ( N e w

York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992).


Recently, in northwestern Arkansas we had a profound example that shook the agri-cultural community. A private individual bought 800 acres of scrub forest, which heintended to bulldoze and put into cattle pasture. His neighbors had an injunction placedagainst this particular use of his private property, saying that he was infringing theirability to enjoy the traditional views that they had become accustomed to and thereforehe was impinging on their right to enjoy their environment, which he had just pur-chased a portion of. It is going to be an interesting situation to follow as they workthemselves through that set of issues.

Those of us who were engaged in agriculture have long thought that we knew how to handlewater re la t ive ly wel l . We knew i f youcould manage to use it where it fell and when itfell to produce an economic good or a productivecrop for personal consumption, that was probablythe most efficient use of water. If you could notuse it where it fell and when it fell, then youwould try to store it from one period or season un-til the next, where it fell-in the root zone of thecrops that you wanted to grow. That was probably

the second most efficient use of water. All other ways of using water somehow becamemore costly and less efficient and therefore less appropriate. So we spent a lot of timein research directed at capturing water, retaining water, and using water. Now, we arediscovering that that was not done very well and that we are going to have to be moreconcerned about other people's access to water that farmers used to think of as beingtheirs - that, at least in the eyes of many, the water belongs to the greater communityand that the community has a right to say how it is used, when it is used, and where itwill be used. These are issues with which we are going to be dealing not only todaybut, I would judge, for the next 50 years. Winrock International is delighted to play arole in bringing together a group of people who don't normally talk with each other tosee to what extent we can begin to codify and ameliorate those three challenges thatMike Rock gave us.

"There are a few impor-tant issues that requirethe best minds thatmankind can bring tothe subject. One ofthese is conflicts overwater. "

Water conservation and water development:Demand side / Deborah Moore

I split my time between "international issues and U.S. domestic water issues. In theWestern U.S., I've found that there is more communication between what I would callthe academic or research community and the advocacy community. For example, lastfall Congress passed the Central Valley Project Reform Act, which makes some majorchanges in how that Bureau of Reclamation project will be managed. In the process ofdeveloping the legislation and getting it passed, there was a lot of interaction betweenpeople such as Bob Stavins at Harvard, an economist; Charles Wilkinson and DavidGetches at the University of Colorado Law School; Bonnie Colby, University of Ari-zona; and John Leshy, a law professor at Arizona State University. So my perspective

Water Conservation and Water Development: Demand Side 23

from the advocacy side is that support from objective and credible people and their re-search, the results of which really helped make our case, was very valuable. I haven'tseen that same communication or interaction in my work on international policy is-sues. So my desire for getting this type of group together is to take a first step to startthat communication process.

The challenge is to figure out how to meet human needs and human demands for wa-ter, including food production, drinking water, and electricity supplies, without sacri-ficing or mortgaging our water-dependent ecosystems. These ecosystems provide afoundation for many other services—flood control,wastewater treatment, subsistence food products,and watersheds, as the ultimate source of water.Certainly past history has placed human needsabove ecosystem needs. That has probably beenokay in many areas where water supplies havebeen sufficient. We are now approaching the pointwhere demand exceeds supply in many areas andthere is not enough water to go around. We need tostart making harder choices about trade-offs inthose areas. In the future not only are water sup-plies going to be scarce, but capital supplies willbe scarce as well. Already many developing coun-tries are severely in debt, so they don't have extramoney to spend on expensive new irrigation projects and hydropower projects. Somenew irrigation projects have been estimated to cost upwards of $15,000 per hectare.That is money that many countries don't have.

"The challenge is tofigure out how to meethuman needs andhuman demands forwater, including foodproduction, drinkingwater, and electricitysupplies, withoutsacrificing or mortgag-ing our water-dependentecosystems. "

The problem thus far is also that we have spent an enormous amount of money withsome short-term gains in food production and increasing coverage for drinking-watersupplies, but we still seem to be losing ground. The World Bank has spent about $40billion, cumulatively, on water projects. Some people estimate that the total invest-ments necessary over the next decade will be around $600 to $700 billion, but despitespending all that money we still see problems. Clearly, throwing money into new pro-jects is not the only solution. A billion people in the world still lack access to adequateand safe water supplies. Per capita food production is expected to decline over the nextdecade and aquatic ecosystems are in danger of collapse in many areas. In the devel-oping world, lack of information on ecosystems is a severe problem. We don't reallyknow what is happening in many areas of the world.

In the U.S. where there is more information, we have seen fisheries decline 80 to 90percent in many areas. In the Pacific Northwest, some species are being designated asendangered or threatened. In North America aquatic species like mollusks and fishmay be more endangered than terrestrial species. In both the Atlantic and Pacific fly-ways, we have seen dramatic decreases in waterfowl and shorebird populations. So inplaces where we have information, we are seeing a collapse of certain ecosystems. Arewe going to create that same situation elsewhere in the world?


By the year 2000, some estimates are that water demand will increase about 25 percentcompared with 1990, up to about 5,200 cubic kilometers of water per year. Half of thatincrease is in the irrigation sector. Wastewater is expected to be about 2,300 cubic kil-ometers-slightly less than half of the total water demand. All of that wastewater re-quires a certain amount of dilution, particularly if it is not treated. In many areas theresimply is not enough water to dilute the amount of wastes that are going back into thestream. Average losses can be up to half of water withdrawals. So we are taking a lotof water from the stream and returning it in a contaminated condition. Much of it islost along the way through evaporation and seepage. Impacts of climate change mayexacerbate these problems.

Imbedded in all of those estimates are variouschoices about how we are going to meet futureneeds - choices about the kinds of crops that weare going to grow, the industries, the types oftechnologies that we are going to use to meetthose demands. I don't think many people, at least

in this room, will disagree over the goals. Everyone wants to feed the world. Everyonewants to provide universal coverage for drinking water. Everyone wants to protect theenvironment. The question is, what are the best methods of meeting those differentgoals?

I want to talk about how far we can go toward meeting new demands for water withoutbuilding major new infrastructure projects and without further degrading ecosystems.Similar to the energy efficiency discussion that has gone on, we need to treat waterconservation and efficiency as a new source of supply. There are areas where we canactually cut water use and reallocate the saved water to meet new demands. With irri-gation efficiency on average about 50 percent worldwide, the losses in the irrigationsector (recognizing that not all of them are irretrievable losses) are about 1,600 cubickilometers per year. If we were able to recapture even a quarter of those losses, wecould provide enough water to meet all the increase in municipal and industrial de-mand. The possibility of recapturing losses in irrigation and reallocating the savedwater to other uses provides a new supply of water that we need to look at. SandraPostel's book The Last Oasis1 provides a variety of estimates about how much we cancut back demand in various sectors without sacrificing economic activity or quality oflife.

"We need to treat waterconservation andefficiency as a newsource of supply."

In addition, conservation can reduce the amount of wastewater that we producethereby again increasing the amount of useable supply. In conservation, I include otherthings like crop choices - are we going to grow sugarcane or tobacco or cotton in veryarid environments? About 38 percent of total grain production is fed to livestock. Isthat the kind of choice that we want to continue to make in the future as water suppliesbecome scarce?

1 Sandra Postel, The Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).

Water Conservation and Water Development: Demand Side 25

The second area of interest is in water transfers and the issue of allocation. Irrigation isthe largest single water use worldwide. It accounts for about 70 percent of total waterdemand and 80 to 90 percent of total consumptive water use. So, clearly, if we want toincrease water supplies for municipal and industrial use or increase water supplies forenvironmental protection and ecosystem maintenance, it is going to come from the irri-gation sector. How do we match that with our other goals of increasing food supply?That is going to be the tricky one. Again some gross estimates: A 10-percent reductionin irrigation withdrawals could provide more than twice as much water as the new mu-nicipal and industrial demands. So if we can increase food production through rainfedand dryland areas, and cut back some on the irriga-tion, we can provide more than enough new waterto meet these other growing demands. There areserious questions about doing that-the impacts onlocal economies, impact on groundwater rechargein some areas, the impact on other farmers in theregion.

"A 10-percent reductionin irrigation withdrawalscould provide more thantwice as much water asthe new municipal andindustrial demands."

Then, last, though not strictly conservation, are alternatives to new capacity, and thisgets into the large-scale, small-scale debate. The primary point is that often the tech-nologies and the know-how are available to implement effective small-scale irrigationsystems or improved production in rainfed systems. The problems are often political orinstitutional. The Last Oasis documents many low-cost irrigation improvements aswell as small-scale rainwater harvesting systems. I read in the 1992-93 world resourcesreport2 that water harvesting could increase agricultural production on 10 millionhectares in Africa in the short term and 50 million hectares in the long term, which isfairly significant.

From my perspective, the goal is to supply water services not simply water supply.When we focus on the goal of water supply, we think about how to come up with acertain volume of water to allocate to a sector versus thinking of water services as theend result that we get from using that water. We grow food. If the goal is to grow food,irrigation is one means of doing that. There may be other means. Similarly, in industrythere may be substitutions that we can make for more water whether it is new tech-nologies or something else. I would like to focus on how to provide water services notjust water supplies.

The obstacles to doing all these things that sound great are that many of them are po-litical - political at the local level, at the national level, and at the international level ininstitutions like the World Bank. There are a lot of pork-barrel politics going on. Ev-eryone wants to bring home a big new project and there are a lot of different industriesthat have grown up around those projects. If you look at World Bank procurementcontracts, more money for IDA loans to developing countries, in some cases, is goingback to industrialized - country contractors than stays in the country. If we are all inter-ested in poverty alleviation, it is not clear to me that giving loans to a French or Ger-

2 World Resources Institute, World Resources /992-93 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992).


man or American construction company is going to help produce local development inCameroon.

I think political problems are our number one priority, but there are technical problemsas well. Have demand-side alternatives been given adequate recognition in the projectdesign process? Have we really looked at the true costs of wasting water and ineffi-ciency over the long term as well as the true costs of environmental damage? Also, wedon't always know what local communities want. We have tended to take a top-downapproach, and I think we need information coming from the ground up. Last, we needto overcome all the institutional barriers for getting some of these new ideas through,whether it is about allocations, decentralization, or new technologies.

Water conservation and water development:Supply side / David Seckler

One of the disadvantages of having spent a lot of time in a field like water is youeventually start learning how complicated it is and you get more confused. At least,this is my experience. I find myself now writing papers that refute papers that I wrote 5or 10 years ago. I say that because I am going to be a bit dogmatic in what I say here,but I am always open to argument and I can change my mind.

I would like to begin with some issues that we are going to have to address soon andmention some things that illustrate the problems. Along the Niger River in Africa, thepopulation is growing at around 3 percent a year and the flow of the Niger has becomelow because of diversions of water for irrigation and urban use - you can literally walkacross the Niger in the dry season now. The transportation facility that it used to offeris dead and fish production has diminished. The Niger feeds a huge wetland that be-gins at Mopti in Mali and extends to Timbuktu. With continued development of theNiger, we are threatening wetlands that are one of the most important bird sanctuariesof Europe.

Another one, you go across to the other side of Africa - Egypt has almost hit the ab-solute limit of its water development potential under existing conditions. Therefore,they want to build the Jonglei Canal in the Sudan, which would divert water from theSudd, probably the biggest wetland in Africa, to replenish the Nile through the Aswan.That would harm one of the biggest bird sanctuaries in the world. The Egyptians are sosincere in that desire that two presidents of Egypt have declared that they were pre-pared to go to war with Sudan to ensure that they could get that water.

I just got back from Bangladesh. Peter Rogers, Peter Lydon, and I have spent 4 yearsfighting against this huge construction dream that the consulting firms have to train theBrahmaputra at a cost of several billion dollars of somebody else's money. It nowseems that we have pretty well won that battle. That is a big relief. But, what you findhappening there is shocking. Some time ago the Indians put a barrage on the Gangesright on the border with Bangladesh. For several years, they worked under an agree-ment that they would release so much flow in the dry season to Bangladesh. They let

Water Conservation and Water Development: Supply Side 27

that agreement expire 2 years ago and now they have reduced the release toBangladesh by about half of what the normal flow is in the dry season. The WorldBank and everyone else there believes that 5 years from now the Indians won't releaseany flow from the Ganges in the dry season into Bangladesh. This is causing tremen-dous sedimentation on the Bangladesh side of the Ganges and blocking the entrancesto the rivers that go down the western part of Bangladesh and causing saltwater intru-sion. It threatens the Sunderbunds, which depend very much on the water supply inthat area.

The intensity of such problems is increasing rapidly. We are going to have major prob-lems, maybe erupting into wars, over some ofthese water issues. We have to figure out rationalways to address these problems.

Let me give you an idea. There is a good study byPierre Crosson and Jock Anderson on world supplyand demand for cereals.1 They find, on very con-servative grounds, that the demand for cereals is going to double by 2030. Interestinglyenough, about 80 percent of that increased cereal demand is going to be for coarsegrains - maize, sorghum, millet - for livestock feed. Ninety percent of that increaseddemand is going to be in the less developed countries, primarily in Asia because ofhigh income growth. Where is the doubling of production to meet this demand forgrain going to come from? Well, there is, in fact, about twice as much potentialagricultural land in the world as is now being cultivated. It is all in forests andrangeland, of course. If you developed all those forests and rangelands, you could meetthat demand without any increases in yields. One of the problems is the distribution ofthat land. Forty-five percent of that land is in Africa and 49 percent of it is in SouthAmerica. Most of the demand is in Asia. So what kind of a world is going to emergeunder this scenario? Can we say, well, we are going to increase the yield on the exist-ing land to meet this? Or are we quickly going to wind up in a world where Brazil andparts of Africa that have infrastructure are going to become major coarse grainproviders to Asia? It could be a massive development in international trade with terri-bly destructive consequences to environmental and ecological interests.

"We are going to havemajor problems, maybeerupting into wars, oversome of these waterissues."

In Asia, the situation even gets grimmer from a supply standpoint because Asia by2030 could lose 50 million hectares of agricultural land to urbanization. Those of youwho know Asia know that it is much worse than that because almost every town orcity in Asia is in an irrigated area. That is the way history determines things. Most ofthe 50 million hectares that is going to be lost will be irrigated land. That is one-thirdof the total irrigation that now exists in Asia.

What are the alternatives? One idea on which I would differ with many of my col-leagues here is what I call the illusion of water efficiency. Ten years ago I thoughtthere was almost unlimited potential for satisfying agricultural and industrial demands

1 Pierre Crosson and Jock R. Anderson, Resources and Global Food Prospects: Supply andDemandfor Cereals to 2030, Technical Paper 184 (Washington D.C.: World Bank, 1992).


by improving water efficiency. Today, I believe there is very little potential. The illu-sion is that, when we talk about efficiency in irrigation, we say that if we put water ona piece of land with 55 percent irrigation efficiency, what that really means is 55 per-cent of it is used for evapotranspiration by the crop and the other 45 percent is lost(that is, not used for evapotranspiration, which is ultimately the only use the plant hasfor water). The question is what happens then? It implies of course that the 45 percentof that water that is lost could be recaptured by improving irrigation efficiency andthen used for some other purpose.

The fundamental question that we haven't asked is, what really happens to that 45 per-cent of nonevaporated water that is being inefficiently used? In most systems of theworld that are highly developed, that water goes into subsurface or surface return flow.It flows somewhere and somebody downstream picks up that water and reuses it.Then, some evaporates and they let some go and somebody further downstream picksup the residual and some evaporates and they let it go. Through this cycle, you get awater-multiplier effect in which much more water is beneficially used than the amountyou started with. If you add up all the uses, you find that you might have two timesmore water being used than you actually had to begin with, because of this recycling.Therefore, when an irrigation engineer or somebody says, I am going to improve thefirst person's irrigation efficiency from 50 percent to 75 percent, they can do that veryeasily and look like a hero. What they don't understand and they don't see, because it isinvisible, is the decrease in water that some other person downstream is experiencingbecause of the improved efficiency upstream.

Gil Levine did some interesting work a few years ago on recycling in the Nile. Re-cently Jack Keller and I did some more work and we found that the entire irrigationsystem of the Nile runs at around 40 to 50 percent irrigation efficiency at the on-farmlevel. The farmers are only half efficient. But if you add up all the return flows and allthe flows to the industrial and municipal sectors, you find that the Nile Basin as awhole below Aswan is running at around 93 percent efficiency. It may be at 100 per-cent efficiency because you still have to release water into the Mediterranean to takecare of the fisheries and keep out saltwater intrusion. So for all practical purposes, theNile is completely used. Egyptians cannot service any more water demands withouttaking that water away from somebody else. There is no room at a basin level for anygains due to improved water efficiency. The Nile is perhaps the most extreme case, butI think most of the highly developed water basins on the earth today are in that sameposition. They may have a few percentage points left to gain through efficiency at aglobal level, but it isn't enough to talk about seriously.

Jack Keller tells me that California hydrologists realize you have to make sure that ifyou think you are saving water you are really saving water. Now they talk about thedifference between "wet" water and "dry" water in efficiency. There are two kinds ofefficiency. That is, if you just create efficiency that takes return flow away from some-body else, that is dry water, since you are not saving anything. If you create efficiencythat actually does give somebody else some more water, that is wet water. They are

Water Conservation and Water Development: Supply Side 29

finding that the wet water to dry water ratio is plummeting. That is why I am skepticalabout the potential gains from efficiency.

A good example, again in California, is the transfer of water from the Imperial ValleyIrrigation District to the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles. That is one casewhere you can get real efficiency because they were overusing the water, and the waterwas flowing to the Salton Sea, a sink that started to form at the turn of this century dueto excess irrigation. In that case, there was no chance for people to get return water andit was so highly polluted that nobody wanted it. Now, with some efficiency, they canmake a gain. I think the Salton Sea is the exception to the rule, rather than the rule, ofthe water picture that we are facing in the world.

After agricultural demand, which is 80 to 90 percent of all the water used in the world,probably the next largest demand for water is environmental demand for water. I thinkit is much higher than the demand from industrial and urban sectors. The consumptivedemand for water for wetlands, for flowing rivers, for scenic uses, and so on is partic-ularly high. You have large bodies of water totally exposed to the surface with highevaporation rates, so that the consumptive use demand (evaporation) in these environ-mental uses is very high. If you combine that with environmental demand for water inthe preventive sense-that we don't want to develop water because it will drown thisvalley or something like that-I am quite sure that the environmental demand for wa-ter is the second largest demand sector. It is a demand that almost didn't exist until 10to 20 years ago. When you go to developing countries, people often say, we haveplenty of water, look at how much is being "wasted to the sea." Nowadays waste to thesea means wetland habitats at the interface with the estuary. We have this demand ex-plosion and the supply side, in my opinion, collapsing because of inability to gainanything from efficiency.

In considering both feeding people and environmental protection, we have to startthinking how we can develop additional water supplies in order partly to protect theenvironment. I personally don't like the idea that the world is going to go pell-mell intoextensive agriculture to meet this exploding cereal demand, that we are going to rushinto Africa and South America and clear the existing ranges and forests to meet it. Idoubt we can increase yields substantially on the existing irrigated land and I am par-ticularly skeptical about big yield increases on the existing rainfed land. That has beentried for 100 years and it is a miserable experience. People just haven't been able to getit done.

The question is, can we irrigate more land to relieve this tension? We then get the clas-sic question of large dams versus small dams and water conservation techniques and soon. My answer is that we need to do all of those things. We need to have water conser-vation technologies wherever we can get them to work. The record on that score hasbeen bad. In India people have since the last century tried to improve rainfed agricul-ture through terraces and water conservation, almost to no avail. But, we can do thingslike small tanks. I have spent a lot of time doing small tanks and I love them. We cando groundwater development. All that nice small-scale stuff.

30 Warer Scarcitv in Developing Countries

But we also have to realize that we are going to need some more large dams. Largedams and small dams and water consumption are not substitutes for each other. Theyperform different functions. Large dams store water over periods of years. Small damscan only store water for 3 to 6 months and meet interseasonal droughts. More impor-tant. large dams and river diversion schemes transfer water from areas with high rain-fall to areas with low rainfall. Small water-conservation technologies can't do that. Ifwe did every thing we possibly could, building all the big dams we could that meetenvironmental standards and do water conservation and everything else, we would stillhave a hell of a time meeting a doubled cereal demand over the next 20 to 30 years.The big challenge is how to get together people interested in the environment, peopleinterested in production, engineers, and ecologists to find the technologies and thedesigns for dams and other technologies that will enable us to go ahead with some pro-duction and at the same time to keep the environment from being damaged by exten-sive agriculture.

Rock: I think the issue has been well cast by Deborah and David.

Discussion

Gleick: The Pacific Institute has a project called Research and Activism in which webring together researchers and activists under this kind of round table format. I want tomake a couple of points about such meetings and how to make them successful. Themost important is to understand definitions to make sure that we are talking about thesame things. To give an example, this morning the question of conservation efficiencyversus new supply came up. An additional distinction might be useful. New supply isone issue and increasing the efficiency with which we use water in a particular sectoris another issue. A third issue is transfers of water from one sector to another. For ex-ample, changing the crop we grow - instead of growing alfalfa or cotton or rice inCalifornia, growing something that requires less water and shifting that water withinthe agricultural sector or shifting the water from the agricultural sector to the urbansector - is not necessarily the same thing as conservation or not necessarily the samething as increasing the efficiency of water use. I think we could talk a little more aboutthose kinds of definitions.

Another point: I am not sure anyone here would argue that under no circumstancesshould we develop new supply. Perhaps some people would say under no circum-stances should we build any more large dams, and I think that question is worth pur-suing. Perhaps, instead, the question is, under what conditions should new sources ofsupply be developed? And a subset of that might be, under what conditions should newlarge dams be built? New large dams tend to be in a category by themselves, and thatmight be worth discussing. Everyone here probably would agree that some new largedams are going to be built, and the real question is, under what circumstances, underwhat conditions of environmental assessment, under what financial and economic situ-ations? That might be worth pursuing as well.

Discussion 31

First, the question about goals. Everybody has different goals on the water side. Is thegoal long-term food security? In which case the question is, do we want to increase ir-rigation water and if so how do we do it? Is the question supplying water for urbancenters and does that mean taking water away from irrigation? If our only concern isurban supplies, then surely we can take water away from irrigation by either shiftingthe crops we grow or improving the efficiency with which we use water. However, asDavid Seckler said, ultimately the food question may be a more difficult problem tosolve than the urban problem. Is the generation of electricity and hydroelectricity - andsupplying the water to generate energy - basic human needs?

Finally, I have a question about the wet versus dryconcept. I understand the concept, I think, but Ifind it difficult to believe that in Egypt there is notin fact a lot of wet water that could be achieved byincreasing the efficiency with which it is used inthe agricultural community and inserting anotheruser.

"Perhaps the question is,under what conditionsshould new sources ofsupply be developed?And a subset of thatmight be, under whatconditions should newlarge dams be built?"Seckler: Let Gil Levine comment on that.

Levine: With respect to the question of defini-tion, there are three words that we have to have clear. One is requirements. The secondis demands. The third is wants. They are not the same. We keep talking about waterrequirements for crops, and there are very few water requirements for crops. There areways in which crops respond to different amounts of water. You have responsefunctions. Depending upon what yields you want and what crops you grow, you makedecisions about how much water to put on. It is not a question of requirements. Thereare other factors that influence how much water you put on in addition to the basicphysical requirements of survival. The same thing is true with respect to humanbeings. The water that is required to survive is relatively modest. We use much morewater than we require for a variety of reasons. So we need to keep in mind thosedifferences and recognize that there are many factors other than basic survival.

With respect to the question about the Nile. I agree with David Seckler that there is anoverestimation of what can be saved when we see relatively low water-use efficienciesin irrigation. In the Nile, when you look at the upstream irrigation systems, they haverelatively low efficiencies in classical engineering terms. When you look at it on awatershed basis going down to the ocean, there is practically no waste. There is no ex-cess water going to the sea. How many times you can reuse it in that process dependson how much consumptive use takes place and what happens to water quality. The pa-per that Jack Keller did showed that as the water was reused for agricultural purposes,the quality of the water decreased so you get salt accumulation problems.1

1 Jack Keller, Implications of Improving Agricultural Water Use Efficiency on Egypt's Waterand Salinity Balance, Center for Economic Policy Studies Discussion Paper 6 (Arlington,Virginia: Winrock International, 1992).


That is what we have seen in Pakistan, too. When you look at the land that is being ir-rigated in one 250-mile part of the system that supposedly has fresh groundwater andthat is being used, the overall salt balance shows there is no way to sustain that area inagriculture because the salt will accumulate in the soil. The only way to have sustain-able agriculture in that area is to reduce the amount of land that is growing crops.There is much less water available in many of the systems than people think. That isvery disturbing.

Seckler: I mentioned the Salton Sea example for a specific reason. The ImperialDistrict is one of the few cases that I know in a highly developed water system whereyou actually did have water going into a sink and not being used - except now thereare some environmental benefits to the Salton Sea. There, you actually could improveon-farm efficiency and take the improved water saving and offer it to the MetropolitanWater District, which is what they are doing. That case is a notable exception. In mostcases water does not run into some sink. It just flows down the river basin and is con-tinually recycled until the water quality business stops it or it hits the sea, which is an-other water quality problem. That is the end of it. So if you think you are going to gainanything by efficiency, you won't do it because you will lose down below what youpicked up above. You can always transfer from low to high value uses. But, that isn'tgoing to accomplish a lot if you don't have any wet water to transfer.

Rogers: The All-American Canal in the Imperial Valley is a fascinating case. Themost successful agriculture in that area doesn't actually take place inside the U.S. Ittakes place over the border in Mexico from seepage from the All-American Canal. Sothese people are going to be wiped out by the lining of the canal to save water for LosAngeles. We can say it all depends on where you draw the boundary. So there goesyour example: If you don't count the Mexicans, fine; if you count the Mexicans, it ain'tfine.

Seckler: I count them. I guess you are right.

Yudelman: The relationship between efficiency in a particular area and overall effi-ciency raises an important issue in evaluating projects. Many projects have been con-demned for being inefficient. On the other hand, if you look at it from a water-basinpoint of view, then, of course, the projects may not have been as inefficient as wethought they were. Had I known more about this when I was running things at theWorld Bank, we might have looked at some of these issues quite differently.

On the macro issue, I have also been doing some work on demand and supply for food.What isn't emphasized in the study by Crosson and Anderson is that there has been atremendous change in demand because there has been a fundamental change in thedemographic situation of the world. Thirty or forty years ago, we could see how foodsupply could be increased, but we felt we would always run up against this tremendousbarrier of demographic pressures. What we see now in this strange way is that theGreen Revolution did buy time. That time has been well spent because there has beena demographic transition, notably in Asia and Latin America, but far less so in most ofAfrica. One shouldn't lose sight of that. My own projections of demand, reflected to

Discussion 33

some extent in the Crosson and Anderson study, show quite a sharp decrease in therate of growth of demand. That is very important because if much of this increase indemand is going to be satisfied in Asia, it will have to come from increases in yields.So in Asia we come to the question, at what rate can yields increase? In the course ofthe last decade or so, they have been increasing very rapidly.

The next point is, what about the increase in the grains grown in the dryland areas?The basic assumption in the study by Crosson and Anderson is that people will con-tinue to eat meat. As incomes rise, the demand for meat will rise rapidly and the de-rived amount of grain will increase. But, will people eat meat 25 years from now?What kind of meat? This is what this issue hinges on. We can look at the consumptionpatterns and see how they are changing. I am far less pessimistic about the ability toprovide food enough for the world, except for two regions. One is Africa (for a largenumber of reasons that aren't relevant here) and the second is the Middle East, where Ido think that the grave constraint is going to be water.

That brings me to the last issue, efficiency. I am somewhat bemused by the argumentthat you cannot raise the efficiency of water use in agriculture because what you gainon the swings you lose on the roundabout. Look at Israel for instance. It is absolutelystunning how they have raised the efficiency of water use and had overall demandmanagement, with a system that allocates water between competing sectors. By 2020 itis estimated that all the water for agriculture will be recycled from waste use.

Blake: I look at this from a less technical point than Monty Yudelman. Assuming wecan get the technologies that use less water, I find a terrific lack of political will incountries to face up to these problems. I was in India not long ago talking with Indianofficials. The problem was the blocking of effective action to reorganize irrigation bymiddle-level bureaucrats for their own reasons - a lot of other things they want to usethe money for, some of them good and a lot of them not so good. There is a great needto generate the knowledge or fear or something that is going to move people that haveto take big investment decisions. Somehow we have to help people come to grips withthese problems, support them with investment, support them with necessary research,and so forth. But, the most urgent need is raising the knowledge and the will to makethe tough decisions that the deteriorating situation requires.

Svendsen: Monty Yudelman and Ambassador Blake have pointed us in a directionthat I would like to go. That is, to move away from the question of irrigation efficiencycalculated in hydrologic terms and to look more at the question of the productivity ofwater. There are ways to increase the output from the amount of water that is beingused now in agriculture without necessarily bringing new land into production andwithout necessarily changing the overall basin efficiency. Those basin efficiencies thatwe see are already clearly high. That gets us into the question of how do you take aquantum of water and make it more productive in terms of either crop output or interms of value of output. That raises interesting institutional questions about propertyrights, allocational mechanisms, and intervening institutions, irrigation departments forexample. That is where a good deal of the potential that we have for getting more fromthe irrigated agricultural system lies.


Meinzen-Dick: Ambassador Blake said something about people problems. We arestarting to think about water as a system and looking at it as a hydrologic system or asan ecosystem, but we also need to look at human systems. There is a need for foodproduction. What isn't produced on irrigated lands is going to be produced on rainfedlands, which may be pushing into marginal areas and fragile ecosystems. There is alsothe need for livelihoods, and people who are not supported in one area will need to besupported by industrial development and then food imports, perhaps. We can't justdraw boundaries around a plot of irrigated land or even around the water and soil

system. We have to look at what is happening topeople and to support them.

Rogers: Water gets very complicated. Wetalked about people problems and how messythey are. We do have some powerful tools fordealing with these types of issues. Certainlypricing is an important way of getting the signalsright. How do you price water? It is hard if waterbelongs to God or the water belongs to the state.There are ways of bringing it down to the realmof ownership rights or access rights in the devel-

oping water markets. This has happened in the United States beyond the wildestexpectations of the water experts who thought about these things and proposed it foryears but never believed it would actually happen. As long as we don't assign value towater and don't price it in some way, we will never solve these arguments because it isgoing to be the individual evaluation of the individual group that is doing this. I thinklots of the economic uses can be dealt with directly by some sort of pricing. Where werun into problems is in the in-stream uses - the uses by the ecosystem of this valuableresource. There are even approaches to that. In our country we have chosen to do itpolitically by saying, take 800,000 acre-feet from the Central Valley and give it to thefish. We have just done that. It is not necessarily the best way, but it is one way. I thinkthat you can get good economic and environmental outcomes by making sure the wateris allocated properly because it then will take a lot of water away from agriculture andput it to more valuable use.

"The worst nightmare isthat we go to alternativedispute resolutionmethods, and we try tore-create the market byhaving everybody sitaround the table andtalk."

The issue about people building on valuable irrigation land: People do that becauseland for urban use is much more valuable than irrigated land. You would be crazy notto. In fact, I would urge people to do so. The development of these countries is notgoing to come through irrigated agriculture; it is going to come through other eco-nomic activities. We have to remember that it is a trade-off between values explicitlystated through market mechanisms that is going to provide a much easier way thanhaving every little group saying, we can arbitrate it, or, we can do these things. Theworst nightmare is that we go to alternative dispute resolution methods, and we try tore-create the market by having everybody sit around the table and talk.

Gleick: We need to consider communities that perhaps don't have economic powerand that would lose water in situations where we rely entirely on economic pricing.

Discussion 35

We are running into such debates in the western U.S., not just with ecosystems, butwith farm communities that depend entirely on subsidized water. We have to debatewhether we care about the community as an entity at all for other reasons.

I'm suffering from the definitional problem that I raised. I find that when I asked aboutwet water in Egypt and the possibility of increasing efficiency, Gilbert Levine shakeshis head very sadly, and then when Mark Svendsen says we need to talk aboutincreasing productivity, Gilbert nods his head and says, yes, that is a good thing to doand that would free up wet water, I gather. I am trying to think about the Nile in thiscontext - a system that I know a bit about. I'm not sure what I am missing here.Perhaps we should come back to this question ofwet water. We are debating this in California, thewet water versus dry water with the water banks,and whether we are buying real water when we dothat.

"If you are going to usethe market system toimprove productivity ofwater, we have to seethat it isn't just amatter of economics.We have to see thephysical potential downthere below the eco-nomic system - where isthe improvementphysically going tocome from?"

Seckler: I want to respond to the two Peters.Peter Rogers and I have worked together for a longtime. It is an interesting example of familiaritybreeds contempt in the sense that I am an econo-mist, and I get hypnotized with all these hydrologicthings and Peter is an engineer and hydrologistwho is hypnotized with the economics. He has alot of faith in the price system and I don't havemuch. I have a lot of faith in engineers and hedoesn't have any. This is a continuing saga for us.

If you are going to use the market system to improve productivity of water, we have tosee that it isn't just a matter of economics. We have to see the physical potential downthere below the economic system - where is the improvement physically going tocome from? That's my problem with the pricing business. Pricing is just going toshuffle the water around and not substantially change the amount of water. It is theamount of water that matters.

In the Nile, for example, we transfer water from agriculture to the industrial and urbansector, which we should do. That should be the first priority because it is a highervalue use. It doesn't solve Egypt's problem of feeding its people. And there is a prob-lem if you say, let them import food. It is the problem of getting the foreign exchangeto do that-and then we would also displace the problem to perhaps Brazil or NorthAfrica. I always like to see the physical consequences of price policies. In the Nile, Ithink it is perfectly demonstrated in Jack Keller's paper. There's your dry water. Jackspelled it out step-by-step right through the Nile. What happens is as you go throughthese iterations along the Nile from the Aswan north, you evaporate a bit of that waterand then you pass a bit down, increasing the salt concentration every time, even if itisn't picking up salt on the way, until finally you converge to a position near theMediterranean where the salinity loads are so high that you can't use it for anything.Then, you pass it on into the sea. If you could improve water quality through these


transfers, you can gain. You are not going to gain water by improving the efficiency of

the use upstream.

Gleick: So you are saying that it is a quality limitation in the Nile?

Seckler: Yes, and even that is not a big deal.

Gleick: We have that problem in the Colorado. There are things that you can do todeal with that problem.

Seckler: Yes.

Gleick: What you have said is only true if you are telling me that nothing can bedone to increase the productivity of agriculturewith the same amount of water and deal withquality as well.

Seckler: You can gain some if you could keepthe water from becoming more salty as it goesdown. But, even that is small potatoes in the Nilebecause the discharge into the Mediterranean isalready not even 20 percent of the Aswan out-flow. So that discharge isn't very much. The bigfear is that if you reduce that discharge a bit more

you are going to get a lot more saltwater intrusion, so you don't have much gain. Youdon't have much room to do anything. That's the important lesson of the Nile. Youcan't do much.

"There is no questionthat if cotton produc-tion in Central Asia hadbeen in drip irrigationrather than in flood orfurrow irrigation, theAral Sea would be inmuch better shape."

Moore: There are environmental advantages to efficiency. If you can reduce theamount of water diverted, you can leave some of the water in the stream at a higherquality and not simply rely on getting the water back again and then in a degradedstate. The argument that other people depend on the waste, and so we have to institu-tionalize waste because people depend on it, is a bit of a straw man. If we leave morewater in the river, that can help supply the downstream users who were previously de-pending on the waste. Meanwhile, it stays in the river for a longer stretch, and youhave also maintained the river environment. Now, there are groundwater rechargequestions, but I think that we can deal directly with some of those if we have greaterefficiency. Just saying, the way it cycles through from surface to subsurface now andthe way it gets degraded along the way is basically okay because of this multiplier ef-fect is misguided. There are things that we can do. You both seem to be saying that inthe case of the Nile there is nothing we can do. If that is true, it is very disturbing.

Sklar: Are we saying that there are no gains to be made by reducing evaporativelosses that do not contribute to the physiology of plant growth, and so forth, in the Nileor other systems? My understanding is that there are tremendous opportunities to re-duce evaporative losses.

Yudelman: I want to make one general point. Egypt is the only country that reliesentirely on external sources of water. The Nile is the only source of water for agricul-ture. With the rapidly increasing population, the problem is how to feed the country. In

Discussion 37

Egypt yields have gone up greatly. There have been huge investments to improve theefficiency of agriculture and the efficiency of water use. The world's biggest drainageproject is in Egypt. There have been tremendous investments in improving secondaryand tertiary canals and so forth. The issue that interests me is one of both economicand hydraulic efficiency. That is, how can we make the use of water more efficient?How can you raise the productivity of agriculture? Egypt is the classic case. There youhave to see the water constraint more than anywhere else simply because everythingthey grow is irrigated. The issue that you have to address in this purely irrigated soci-ety is, what are the limits on production? That is the relevant issue, given a big supplyof water, unless you are going to change and divert the Nile and get water from some-where else. In this context I am not sure whether it is wet water or dry water.

One last point I would like to mention is about pricing. I have had engineers andeconomists working for me and the one thing that they disagree about is water pricing.Economists all say that it has to be done for a whole range of reasons. If you look atthe Dublin water conference,2 the first point they make on water is that you have toattach a value to it. As an economist I can't see how you can argue with it. When wedeal with the engineers, they say, yes but how are we going to do it? What system areyou going to use for measuring if you don't have volumetric meters? I think over timedifferent ways of pricing water have been developed. I agree with Peter Rogers thatthis issue is number one - the value of water. When I was at the World Bank, the mostfavored projects were multipurpose projects that served urban areas and rural areas be-cause you could charge water in the urban area at about 5 or 10 times what youcharged in the rural areas. This made them economic.

Postel: I would agree about the efficiency potential being more real in more casesthan David Seckler implies. I think not just in terms of absolute quantity of watersaved but where the water is and what other services it is providing. There is no ques-tion that if cotton production in Central Asia had been in drip irrigation rather than inflood or furrow irrigation, the Aral Sea would be in much better shape. You might saythat that is another case of a sink, where there was basically water flowing into aclosed water system, but I think there are more cases like that - not just in terms of anabsolute sink but where you are servicing a wetland or some other ecological functionby way of not manipulating the basic hydrology as much as you would if you are notinvesting at all in efficiency.

To respond to Monty Yudelman's point about Israel and Egypt, Israel has succeeded inincreasing water efficiency and water productivity dramatically, but what I findsobering is that they have not done much since about the mid-1970s. They achieved alot of these gains in the 1960s and they haven't been able to do much more since. Sowhat is the next technological or agricultural leap to be made? Who is going to find it?I find that particularly of concern because the Israelis certainly have invested morethought, energy, and financial resources into researching this than almost any other

2 International Conference on Water and the Environment, Dublin, January 1992. Sponsored bythe United Nations.

38 Water Scarcity in Developing COllntries

country. They are now beginning to shift fresh water from agriculture and supplyingagriculture with treated municipal wastewater. That is their next strategy, and it willlast for a while. It looks to me like the solutions are getting thin.

That relates as well to Egypt and the broader question of whether the extent of irri-gated agriculture as we see it in some of these very dry regions is really sustainable. InEgypt population is growing by a million people every 8 months and yet the govern-ment is still spending an extraordinary amount of money per hectare to reclaim desertland west of the Delta. Some of this land is not producing anything. They have drip ir-

rigation lines and the fields aren't being reallyused. Yet, 20 or 30 years down the line, that wateris not going to be there for those fields. There is abroader economic development question ofwhether continued goals of increasing food self-sufficiency make sense in some of these dryregions.

"An important researchquestion is, how muchof our current foodproduction is beingachieved throughecological deficitfinancing?" An important research question is, how much of

our current food production is being achievedthrough ecological deficit financing? How much of it is through drawing down watersupplies or relying on water supplies that are being used unsustainably. If you startsubtracting the amount of production in the Punjab of India that is drawing downgroundwater or the 4 million tons of wheat in Saudi Arabia that are dependent onmining of a fossil aquifer, or, if you add up all those tons of grain that are beingproduced through the unsustainable use of water and subtract that from the foodsupply, you get an even gloomier picture than you would get from the Crosson andAnderson report.

Seckler: The Aral Sea is an interesting example of what I was trying to talk about. Ifyou are inefficiently irrigating cotton in the Aral Sea basin, then that water you arewasting by low efficiency irrigation, as far as I know, can only come back into the AralSea.

Peabody: But there is another lake forming.

Seckler: Then we have another Aral Sea. It isn't like you have a different deal. Thatwater, if it is lost underground, is just going to wind up coming back into the river andgoing back to the Aral Sea.

Peabody: It goes in different places.

Seckler: Then you are trading Aral Sea for Aral Sea. It might be a gain now, I don'tknow.Moore: That's the environmental point - what are you trading and do you want it inthe sea or do you want it in the ground or what?

Seckler: You're not wasting it. There are two basins involved, evidently, so that it isdraining to another sink over there. If it were just one basin, it would go back to theAral Sea, so you wouldn't gain. But if there is another one, you can talk about that.

Discussion 39

Postel: Much is lost through evaporation in a climate like that and if you were usinga more efficient technology like drip where you lose very little, more water would stayin the basin and flow into the Aral Sea ecosystem.

Levine: The figures in Israel typically show about a 20 percent saving in evapotran-spiration by using drip in contrast to flooding. So that is your upper limit, assumingthat there is no salt accumulation problem. That is a big assumption that you can'tmake all over.

Gleick: Twenty percent is a substantial number.

Levine: Twenty percent. That's where you are. Even when the efficiencies are on theorder of 50 percent. That is the maximum. That represents a substantial investment. Itis useful for tomatoes or for certain fruit crops. It certainly is not 'appropriate for mostfield crops unless the price of all the agricultural products is going to go up verysubstantially.

Gleick: We've moved from zero to 20 percent.

Levine: For Egypt, there are possibilities to gain certain environmental benefits in thestream if you exercise more control over the root of the reuse. How much that reallywill represent, I don't think anyone knows. But, the question is really efficiency, whichhas two parts. One is the numerator and the other is the denominator. When you talkabout saving the water, you are talking about the denominator. That is very difficult todo. You physically have to do lots of things. The numerator is whatever you are usingas your efficiency measure - the yield or the value and so on. That's where, in effect,the greatest gains have been made. That is the Green Revolution. The amount of waterused by traditional rice is essentially the same as that used by modern varieties. But ifyou get three times the yield, you have tripled your efficiency in terms of the use ofthat resource.

Now one of the empirical issues is, in a given situation, where is your option? Do youget the most for your effort by looking at the numerator or looking at the denominator?

Gleick: When I talk about increasing efficiency and increasing productivity, I'mtalking about both the numerator and the denominator. In some cases I actually thinkthere are gains to be made in the denominator, but I will tentatively accept yourpremise that the greatest gains can be made in the numerator. Nevertheless, those gainswill increase over all the things that you can produce with the same amount of water inEgypt. I would argue elsewhere, but you are saying that Egypt is the toughest nut tocrack at the moment. I think there is still enormous potential there.

Moore: If 20 percent is an upper limit on gains to be made in the denominatorthrough serious financial investments and capital and infrastructure, drip irrigation,etc., even if there are 5 or 10 percent gains to be made, if it is during the right time ofthe year, especially during dry season, the environmental gains from that 5 to 10 per-cent may be more in terms of the ecosystem. There are various thresholds for lowflows, where if you can increase low flows at critical times in the year, you may get a


greater environmental gain. Again it goes back to other choices about crops and otheractivities you choose to do.

Levine: The discussion points out an inherent difficulty that as soon as you starttalking about the water, you are dealing with site-specific situations. It is difficult togeneralize about site-specific situations. In every case, nothing is perfect so there isalways going to be some opportunity either on the denominator side or the numeratorside. That is not the issue. The issue is, is there something generic in the way theproblems have to be addressed? That does raise institutional issues and broad policyissues and is much less about specific physical situations.

Moore: We have made generalizations in the past that large-scale irrigation systemswill work anywhere and everywhere, and we have used them in some ways as ablueprint around the world. We have maybe made that mistake in the past and perhapswe should try to avoid it in the future.

Groenfeldt: We talk about the water that we can see and about some that gets evap-orated and some that goes into seepage. I would be more comfortable in this discussionif we had a sense of where is all the water going and traced it until it disappears fromour system. Let's expand the system to include seepage water - how much of it is go-ing to shallow aquifers and how much is it going to deep seepage where it can't be re-covered? Even when it can't be recovered, what does that mean? Does it serve any use-ful purpose environmentally? Do these deep aquifers matter to us? Or, in the fairlyshallow subsurface area does water that seeps down from surface irrigation matter en-vironmentally? Or if not, then it sounds like we would be much better off using drip ir-rigation and trying to minimize how much water we lose from the root zone of thecrop. I would even like to know what happens to the moisture in the crop when thecrop is drying. That moisture eventually comes back into the atmosphere and becomesrain somewhere. Is there an argument to be made that we should maximize evaporationas far inland as possible to increase the chances of recapturing some of it as rainfallrather than having the rain fall in the ocean? I worked in northwest India along theBhakra Canal system where everyone claimed that there is more rainfall. I neverchecked the figures. Certainly, the local environment had been changed in terms ofdust storms and microclimatic conditions. That might be another benefit from sloppyirrigation. The water that is wasted in evaporation might serve some purpose. Tenyears ago we might have scoffed at the idea of releasing water for fish. Maybe 10years from now we will be concerned about maximizing evaporation under certainairstream conditions so we can pick it up later on.

Castro: The reason we are discussing the efficiency issue versus the increase in sup-ply is we are assuming there is going to be more demand for food in the future. Popu-lation is going to double in 30 years; therefore, we need more food and we need to usemore water. We will then face the situation where there is really no more land to bedeveloped and therefore the only solution, if the population keeps going up, will be ef-ficiency. That seems to suggest that right now might be the time to focus on the prob-lem of efficiency as opposed to increase in supplies so that we don't destroy whatevernatural ecosystems we now have.

Discussion 41

If we said that the demographics is an integral part of this, then we better focus onpricing because that will obviously allow us to allocate water. But some things don'thave a price. In many natural ecosystems you can give values and prices and there canbe trade-offs, etc., but for some things in some ecosystems, some wetlands, becausethey are unique and cannot be replaced, there is no way that you can put a price onthem. We have to take that into account when we let the pricing system allocate waterfreely.

I am surprised that we haven't touched climate change yet. The effects of climatechange in water are going to be serious, and we have to take that into account.

Meinzen-Dick: I am worried that putting too much faith in the markets is going tolead to real problems. I heard somebody from the World Bank relate an argument thatwas presented to him in India that we might need to reduce the irrigated area that iscurrently serving subsistence cultivation and put it into higher value commercial crops.This sounded good until you understand the political economy of the area, whichmeans that there is a large sugarcane lobby. Sugarcane industrialists in India receivemuch more than the world price of sugar. Large farmers are favored in being able togrow sugarcane because of the links to the mills. So this lobby argues that watershould be concentrated and given to them for growing sugarcane rather than"unimportant" subsistence crops like wheat, rice, grains. Isn't there something in eco-nomics about the law of second best - that if you have price distortions in one area,then going to a free-market system on another commodity is not necessarily going tolead where you want. It is very important in a lot of these changes to look at the politi-cal economy. Who is behind this? Who is going to benefit? Who is going to lose? Inthis case, many small farmers are going to lose access to water, if this argument goesthrough.

Sklar: If we look at the larger picture to see where are the greatest constraints and atthe same time where are the greatest opportunities for change, it is at the political, in-stitutional level. We should be concentrating more in this discussion on how we aregoing to change the way we do business. We have many good policies. All over theworld, we have talented people who are thinking about these questions. We have inno-vative technologies. We have a real commitment toward some of the same goals thatwe are looking at. At the same time, we have an embarrassing record of implementa-tion of the thinking, of the policies, and of the designs that we come up with. TheWorld Bank is now taking a look at why its portfolio suffers from so many deficien-cies. And the irrigation sector is doing the worst. We have enough experience to beable to identify where we have gone wrong and where we need to make changes in atechnical sense, but what we lack is a feedback loop so that experience influences fu-ture decisions. The problem is that there are many vested interests who have a short-term interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are. Unfortunately themiddle bureaucrats in India or wherever have a vested interest in seeing that certainprojects go ahead whether or not they are likely to achieve their stated goals.

We have the same incentives here in this country. We need the World Bank to keepmoving money out the door. We have procurement needs that are built into the way


our foreign aid is distributed and designed. We have to change this equation. Perhapsthe biggest impact that we could have on this is to bring people who are currently dis-enfranchised into the decision-making process. This could be disenfranchisement dueto economic reasons, due to political reasons, due to the scale of decision making andthe level of democracy in a given country, or whatever. The local people who are di-rectly affected, the users, are not actors. In a sense, we need to have some of them hereat this table. I don't pretend to speak on their behalf, but I do have opportunity to dealwith NGOs that represent many of these people in my daily work.

An example of how this can make a difference, and how also there is a built-in institu-tional bias that makes it difficult to bring about greater openness in decision making, isthe World Bank's new water resources management policy. We have been pushing thestaff developing the policy to listen to NGOs. At first they said water management is atechnical issue, and NGOs don't really know about this stuff. They said, we want tohear from engineers. We want to hear from economists. But International Rivers Net-work obtained copies of the draft of the policy and sent it out to hundreds of NGOsand received a strong response. People from many different countries, many differenttypes of organizations, grassroots groups, and national organizations had substantivethings to say not just about environment but about all aspects of the policy. In fact,many of their ideas now appear in the latest draft. Unfortunately, they don't appear asmuch in the "implications for the bank" section of the draft, but I think many of theWorld Bank staff have realized that it actually was a valuable experience.

These people have a different perspective that would cut across some of what I believeare artificial divisions between advocates and researchers, divisions between environ-mentalists and developmentalists. For example, many of the NGOs that work directlywith people who are affected by proposed large dam projects for which it is question-able whether the benefits outweigh the costs don't see a difference between environ-ment and development. They are one and the same. Essentially, water-dependentecosystems are human needs. Communities that are dependent upon freshwater fish-eries don't see the ecosystem as something separate and apart from them that needs tobe protected. They don't see the birds as belonging to some place else. The humancommunity is part of the ecosystem from this perspective. That is something I think welose at the macro-level, policy-making, boardroom setting.

We need to be thinking about how to change the way decisions are made, how tocommunicate to those vested interests that currently are benefiting in a short-termsense that they are also in a long-term sense at risk by continuing business as usual,and how we can make a requirement in terms of the conditions that Peter Gleick wastalking about. Under what conditions are we going to build new supply projects? Thisis one of the rock bottom conditions that we need to have participation by the benefi-ciaries, the users, the people affected by the project. The people actually have moreexperience on a certain level than can be gained by reading the research literature. Thiscan be done, and it doesn't necessarily alienate borrowing governments or require apolitical revolution. We are talking about something that will benefit all of us in theshort and the long term.

Discussion 43

Ellis: Just an observation about what we have been talking about and what we haven'tbeen talking about, which I find encouraging. We started out with Gil Levine and DaveSeckler saying our existing irrigation systems are limited. Then they talked about thetechnical reasons why they are limited. They didn't say it, but I think that means wehave to think about more irrigation. If we are going to increase food production, it isgoing to be with an expansion of irrigation. Peter Gleick and Deborah Moore tookthem up on that and said, no, we can increase efficiency through technical means andso on. There are institutional and political things that we need to think about, likepricing mechanisms. We don't necessarily need to expand but we need to improvewhat we have. I am pleased that nobody is talking about the need to expand food pro-duction in terms of rainfed agriculture and marginal lands. This group seems to be fo-cusing on how to deal with irrigation as a means of increasing food production and noton how to expand food production into what I would argue are marginal areas.

Groenfeldt: I want to shift the discussion to another part of cutting demand and talkabout other crops and other agricultural practices, as well as other foods. There are alot of ways to decrease demand rather than increasing efficiency. I'm thinking aboutagroforestry, other varieties of existing crop species, such as wheat, rice, maize, andtraditional or low status crops, maybe coarse grains, millet in India, finger millet in SriLanka, jackfruit - traditional crops that are usually relegated to: "Oh, that's what weused to eat but we don't eat those things any more." The conventional research empha-sis is on high input crops - high water-input as well as high other-input crops - whichleads back to water quality problems of pesticide residues.

Those things deserve to be discussed in this forum. How much potential is there for re-ducing water demand or increasing the food output for a given quantum of waterthrough research that emphasizes water potential, focusing on crops that have been ig-nored in the past? It could also stretch to an issue of not only policies butprograms - social marketing to enhance the perceived status of foods that are nowconsidered of almost no value. In Sri Lanka you can have jackfruit for free. You haveto buy rice.

So there is a lot in terms of where research is headed and what decisions we are mak-ing or foregoing in the research agenda and also in terms of what lifestyle-related poli-cies governments adopt that have implications for water demands.

Warren: Bill Adams, a geographer at Cambridge, has done some remarkable workon African water systems. He has beautiful stuff on indigenous knowledge. One strik-ing set of data he has shows that most irrigation users are traditional and indigenous ir-rigated system users - hundreds of thousands of small-scale farmers primarily in Egyptwho have nothing to do with large-scale national and international intervention sys-tems such as those we have been talking about. In Nigeria, 97 percent of the irrigationusers are operating in indigenous systems and have nothing to do with dams. Thesesystems may not look impressive from the air, but when you put them all together youhave something we really have to deal with.


Second, there is a video called "The Goddess and the Computer," produced by theUniversity of Southern California, about a thousand-year-old irrigation system in Balithat came in conflict with the Asian Development Bank. It demonstrates how anindigenous knowledge and decision-making system can be tested with a computer pro-gram. It shows the different options that come from this system and that it does opti-mize the water resource, soil fertility, crop-pest management, and conflict over waterrights. Then the video shows what happened when a $58-million ADB project came inthat completely ignored the local system, even though they tried hard. We had a con-ference at USC a couple of years ago with the ADB and World Bank representatives.They finally admitted, man, we have screwed up a system that is so fine tuned. Here,

you can argue that the ADB came in and folkslike us came in to do the environmental impactand we said there is no relationship between reli-gion and rice, whereas there is a 100 percent rela-tionship. Now we are trying to turn that around. Itshould be Indonesians taking a look at their owndam systems, recording these systems. They arenow starting to do that through the Indonesia Re-source Center for Indigenous Knowledge. That iswhat we are about - trying to get a grip on whatthe structure and functions of existing systems

are, how people at the local level are evaluating the problems they recognize withinthese systems, how they would like to see these systems evolve, and how we can cap-italize on the millions of creative people around the world.

Rock: Let me close with a few reflections on answers to questions about where weagree, where do we disagree, and what we are going to do about it. The presentation byDeborah Moore, I thought, along with Sandra Postel's book, has shown that the envi-ronmental community has come quite a way in thinking about efficiency and trying torely on the price system or some allocative system to deal with efficiency problems.That is a move that has been a long time coming. Deborah focused on what can we doto meet new demands without building new structures. David Seckler, Gil Levine, andPeter Rogers, on the other hand, looked at the problem from a hydrological perspectiveand essentially argued that there is not much to be gained by trying to improve effi-ciency in the system and it seems to me that that was one of the clear points of dis-agreement that emerged.

"The environmentalcommunity has comequite a way in thinkingabout efficiency andtrying to rely on theprice system or someallocative system todeal with efficiencyproblems."

On the agreement side, there was remarkable agreement that human needs, particularlybasic human needs and food, were going to have to be met. How is maybe not so clear,but there wasn't much sentiment that we are going to have to move back to rainfedtechniques and marginal land. So there was agreement that if we could improve irriga-tion efficiencies, we could have agricultural intensification rather than extensification.

Finally, we began to get some discussion on the role of participation and decisionmaking, on distributive impacts of the way in which water is actually allocated, and onwhat the distributive impact of moving to water markets might be. Ruth Meinzen

Discussion 45

Dick's comment around vested interest and crop needs and distribution and the owner-ship of land was well taken.

Now we are going to break into three groups. Each group is meant to focus on what arethe priority areas of concern in both advocacy and research that comes out of this dis-cussion.

Group reports

Walker: We didn't get very controversial because we were looking for areas that wehad an interest in and thought would be important. The most difficult areas to penetrateare the local institutional levels of policy and ways of doing things. It was brought upthat our goal is not to dominate projects or to influence, in a forced way, themanagement of water resources within institutes, but to provide good data and goodsuggestions, based on research and experience, of reliable ways of approaching waterscarcity - whether it is irrigation, supply, demand, or large or small systems. The mainconstraint in coming up with an agenda like that was the question of making the waterhave some price or value to provide accountability and responsibility on the part of theusers.

Water rights came up as another major issue, partly because there is some ongoing re-search, and property rights are linked to that. Again, these institutional issues are diffi-cult to penetrate. It would be beneficial to do research in areas where flexibility intransfer of water rights exists, for example, to see how that is working and whether itcan be a model for others to use. In situations where there are very tight property rightsand few opportunities institutionally, there may be internal flexibilities. One exampleis the exchanging of water rights for land rights. This kind of opportunity arises incertain instances where land ownership is a problem because there is no incentive toinvest in crops or irrigation, but water rights can be given to some of the disenfran-chised and then they are in a position to exchange. So there are areas for flexibilitywithin the institutional constraints.

Another priority is to use the ecosystem as the unit of analysis - rather than parts of itor certain species, certain land areas, certain people - to see the whole project, or de-velopment, or use of water, in terms of the whole ecosystem.

Indigenous cultures should be studied, not as a model or to idealize them, but to bene-fit from their strengths and to determine what can be applied and used today thatwould not be disruptive and that could be incorporated into modern systems.

Rather than focusing on the actual scarcity issue, we were focusing on better use of theresources already available. Does anyone else in my group want to comment?

Sklar: We need to be able to present alternatives both in the actual techniques fordesigning projects and technologies to apply and in the methods of implementa-tion - lending instruments, management structures, management strategies.

Rock: Who has the report for the second group?

46 Water Scarcity in Developing Coulntries

Meinzen-Dick: Our group tended to be a bit dominated by the researchers, so thingstend to be phrased in terms of questions rather than things that we are advocating. Thefirst one was, what are the health impacts of water quality, especially drinking waterand sewerage in urban areas?

Next, how can agricultural goals, either food security or value of output or foreign ex-change generation, or whatever those goals are, be achieved with the least water? Thisincludes advocating other varieties, high-value crops, less-water-demanding crops. useof agricultural research and use of other inputs like more labor, more fertilizer. morechemical inputs. And, what are the implications of changing the cropping system forlocal food security? What are the implications of

higher fertilizer and chemical usage?~ ~

"Indigenous culturesshould be studied, notas a model or to idealizethem, but to benefitfrom their strengths andto determine what canbe applied and usedtoday that would not bedisruptive and thatcould be incorporatedinto modem systems."

Then, in terms of the need for attention to propertyrights and the social implications of the transfer ofwater, what are the losses to some groups? Whatare the gains to others? And, what are the equityimplications of those?

How can irrigation development be managed tomaximize the positive environmental conse-quences? We discussed things such as that irriga-tion development can provide alternatives ofemployment or take pressure off extensive agri-culture. There may be other specific management techniques, for example rice cul-tivation in such a way that it provides artificial wetlands for migratory birds at criticaltimes, or rules within the irrigation system management that control rises of watertables or that specifically manage environmental concerns.

Another question was, how do you define the proper system boundaries? Sometimeseven the nation-state isn't broad enough. So it includes both the physical boundaries ofthe ecosystem, if you like, and also what components fall within that bound-ary - people as well as wetlands, fish, other things that often are not valued.

Rock: Other comments from group two?

Larson: Another key issue is urban water supplies. In Latin America, 70 percent ofthe population is urban. In Africa, urbanization is going to be 50 percent of the popu-lation in 25 or 30 years. Whether or not drinking-water supplies and sanitation systemsget put in for urban populations remains to be seen. The human health impacts of poorurban water and sanitation supplies are substantial.

Groenfeldt: There was also discussion about planning of water resources develop-ment, going beyond the irrigation sector in water resource planning and going beyondthe water sectors to bring in implications for forestry, for the full farming system in-cluding livestock or even industrial uses downstream. Narmada is a good case of notquite going beyond the irrigation sector until forced to do so in the planning.

Rock: The third group?

Group Reports 47

Moore: We spent a lot of time talking about two priorities and gave short shrift to therest. The first one was primarily a research question aimed at determining whethersignificant biological fixes or quantum leaps to increase crop productivity are possiblefrom stabilizing crop output, by reducing the impact of pests and by introducingdrought-resistant crops, or from increasing photosynthetic efficiency.

The second major area we talked about was how to change the culture of institutions,like the World Bank and other regional development banks, to get them to focus moreon project quality as opposed to project quantity - some of the things that came out ofthe Wapenhans internal review of the World Bank's portfolio. People seemed to agreethat major changes needed to occur. There is pos-sibly less agreement about how those changescould occur. The pressure needs to come both frominside the institutions as well as outside, and the

role of nongovernmental organizations on the out-~ ~

side is fairly clear.

"Two major areas youneed to look at whenevaluating darns: Theneed to compensateaffected parties and theneed to address down-stream environmentaleffects. "

The role of researchers and how they can interactin that sense was sensitive, particularly since manyresearchers have to have good relations with bor-rowing governments where they are doing the research. We didn't resolve the issue of sensitivity toward countries' sovereignty andtheir need to make their own decisions versus the pressure that is being brought to bearin donor countries on aid, but we raised it as a flag. Overall, there needs to be greatertransparency in decision making so that when problems occur in project design, theycan be identified early, and people can do something about them rather than coverthem up.

A third priority area was developing criteria for assessing dams. How can we tell agood big dam from a bad big dam and are there conditions that we need to look at?David Seckler suggested two major areas you need to look at when evaluating dams:The need to compensate affected parties and the need to address downstream environ-mental effects. We then also talked about how to deal with uncertainty and lack of in-formation. Gil Levine brought up the notion of making your case for a dam based onpossibilities versus probabilities - that possibilities tend to promote wishful thinkingabout what is going to happen and that perhaps we should look more at probabilitiesand risk assessment so that we don't choose options that have major and irreversibleconsequences.

A fourth one that I am going to stick in is that in assessment of dams we want a levelplaying field, where the supply options as well as the alternatives that we spent thismorning debating are given equal consideration in the evaluation stage, so that wehave more information that we can give to decision makers.

The fourth and the fifth points are related - that there is a lack of good information anddata on the extent and condition of irrigated lands and water resources. Also there islack of information about performance and performance monitoring. That is something


we can say in any field - we don't have enough information. There was a notion that inthe area of water resources, the data may even be worse than in other subject areas. Inforestry, if the tree is there, you can see it and you know it is there. Water is never inone place and it is hard to monitor. The related point being that there is a serious lackof public awareness, that although there are serious problems over global food suppliesand water resources, there is not a sense of urgency or fear the way there is, say, aboutchloroflurocarbons or the ozone hole or climate change or things like that and that weshould be better at portraying that the situation isn't hopeless. These two points providesome area where we should all be able to work together to get the word out better.

The sixth point is the potential for increasingproductivity in rainfed areas. This morning thereseemed to be a tendency to say there may not bevery significant gains to be made in rainfedagriculture, that we have been trying to do that fora long time. But Sandra Postel pointed out thatsince there are a lot of dry land and rainfed areas(83%), a small increase in yield spread over alarge area will still make a significant contributionto increasing agricultural productivity, given a setamount of water. That is maybe a researchquestion at this stage but also an advocacyquestion in terms of getting institutions to shift tolooking at it and making it a priority.

"There is generalagreement that waterneeds to be valued andthat pricing is a tool toget more accurate andbetter allocation ofscarce water supplies.The question is how toimplement it, how toensure that the poor areprotected and that basicneeds are still met."

The seventh is making access to clean water and sanitation a priority. There may beopportunities to have more multipurpose projects, such as irrigation systems that canalso provide rural drinking-water supplies, as well as making sure that gains in watersaved in the irrigation sector or transfers of water from the irrigation sector are used toprovide greater access to drinking-water supplies.

The last thing we talked about was pricing and the value of water. There is generalagreement that water needs to be valued and that pricing is a tool to get more accurateand better allocation of scarce water supplies. The question is how to implement it,how to ensure that the poor are protected and that basic needs are still met, and how tochange the politics, particularly with vested interests. It goes back to the issue thatRuth Meinzen-Dick brought up this morning about sugarcane growers and who hascontrol of the water now and how do you get them to accept paying a higher price andthe political will that goes along with that. Many of these issues are both research andadvocacy questions.

Seckler: One thing on Sandra Postel's point that it is good to get a little yield in-crease over a gigantic area: That has always been the thing that drives everybody torainfed agriculture. But the basic problem that I have encountered in trying to do any-thing in rainfed agriculture is that it is so location-specific that while you can getsomething to work quite well in perhaps one 50-hectare spot, it isn't generalizable overthe vast tract of rainfed lands. One of the advantages of an irrigation system is you

Group Reports 49

kind of impose a homogeneous ecological situation over large tracts of land. Then youcan start doing things that will have a broad effect. The thing that perplexes me in thisrainfed business is that local specificity: You have to reinvent the game every time youmove a kilometer or two.

Havener: That is generally true, but it is not universally true. There are some thingsthat lend themselves to broad-gauge solutions even under rainfed conditions, for in-stance the disease barley yellow dwarf in wheat. Eighty percent of the world's wheatarea is rainfed. And barley yellow dwarf is a serious disease in rainfed conditions aswell as irrigated conditions. If you can solve barley yellow dwarf virus susceptibilityfor rainfed varieties, then you make a real difference in a rainfed situation. Toleranceof wheats or maize to acid soils is the same kind of thing. They do affect rainfed condi-tions and can have very high leverage.

Seckler: In a way, that makes my case, too, because you can do a lot on the existingrainfed area that is pretty productive. It's when you get out of the productive rainfedinto the more marginal rainfed that you get into these problems.

Havener: That was going to be my final point. You have to be working on rainfedareas with relatively high water regimes or you are not going to make it.

Rock: I want to make a few remarks about the overlaps that exist among the discus-sion groups. In at least two of three instances, water pricing and valuation was men-tioned as a priority. In at least two of three of the groups, defining water rights andproperty rights was mentioned as a priority. In at least two of the three groups, therewas concern about what we really know about the numerator: For every unit of waterwhat do we know about output and how big the increase in output can be? In at leasttwo of the three groups, there was agreement that institutional change is likely to playan important role. Finally, in at least two of the three groups there was concern aboutthe impact of water quality in urban areas on health and labor productivity. So thereare six areas where at least two of the three groups identified a list of priorities inwhich there were overlaps.

What we want to turn to now is those areas of overlap and begin to ask, what does thismean for strategy?

Discussion continued

Seckler: To me, a major issue is, are we going to have to get into large-scale waterdevelopment programs in the future, whether large dams or whatever, or can we bythese alleged efficiencies avoid big investments in water development programs?

Gleick: There is a lesson from the energy situation of 10 to 15 years ago when westarted to hear from Amory Lovins that we could eliminate all projected future in-creases in demand for energy and in fact probably close down all the nuclear powerplants in the world if we were much more energy efficient, while the utilities weresaying we need to build thousands and thousands of megawatts of additional power


plants to meet expected growing demand. We are now, 15 years later, still debating theissue except that it is clear that at least some of that benefit is there. Now electric utili-ties for economic reasons are becoming aggressive in the search for efficiency im-provements in very innovative ways - ways we never would have thought about 15years ago. I believe that in the water area the answer is the same, but we are 10 yearsbehind. On the one hand, people are saying there is enormous potential for water con-servation and water efficiency improvements; on the other hand, we have the samesupply-side orientation, and we are just beginning to think about ways of matching thetwo. I think we need to be equally innovative. The question of economics is important,but I don't think there is any doubt that we are going to find mechanisms, both institu-tional and economic, and resources that we didn't expect.

Levine: One of the problems is that, by contrast to the agricultural sector more gen-erally, the irrigation sector is not research oriented. The agricultural sector has built aneffective working relationship between the research community and the users at awhole range of levels. There are both public and private research activities that feedinto that system. But there are essentially no irrigation research institutions. The fewthat are associated with irrigation departments are really physical model builders ofdams and spillways and things like that.

So there is no research tradition, there is essentially no research capability, and there isa great deal of suspicion. Using research to change the irrigation subsector is going tobe much more difficult than in the case of the agricultural sector. The time in which adiscovery is in some way utilized now in the agricultural sector is very small. The ricevariety IR8 was introduced about 1965. Within something like 7 years, 60 percent ofthe Philippines was in the new varieties. In a country with islands, with multiple lan-guages, with a lousy extension system, the farmers picked that up very rapidly. I don'tthink you can expect irrigation departments or ministries of water resources to respondanywhere near that rapidly to anything that is found through irrigation research.

Postel: If you look at northwest Texas or where there have been certain fairly dra-matic changeovers in technologies, they have come pretty quickly once they have beendemonstrated. The LEPA (low-energy precision application) technology and the surge-valve technology spread very quickly.

Levine: You are talking about on-farm technology. On-farm technology is basicallyhandled by the agricultural system.

Postel: But it is an improvement in irrigation technology that has spread.

Levine: It will be much more dependent in developing countries because you aredealing with 1 - or 2-hectare farms. The research will be filtered in some way through agovernment organization.

Rock: Is this because technology is stagnant in irrigation? What you have just said isthe most appalling thing that I have heard today. It suggests that institutionally youhave within the public sector a relationship with the private sector that is just build,build, build.

Svendsen: There are two points that I would

like to pick up on. One is technology andLevine's argument that there really isn't any irriga-tion research capacity, which I think is true at least in the sense of irrigationmanagement, outside of IIMI. Mike Rock's being appalled at the possibility that therehas been no new technology developed that would make irrigation more efficient andmore effective over the past few years is an interesting point. If you look at irrigationsystems being built in India today, the technology in those systems would be perfectlyrecognizable to a turn-of-the-century irrigation engineer. He would be at home withthe manuals, with the gates. Technology development has been mostly in the privatesector, which is what somebody was saying. It has been mostly in the West, and it hasbeen driven mostly by the need to reduce, first, labor costs and, then, energy costs.You don't really have those pressures in the developing countries.

Yudelman: What about pumps?

still expand by 25 million hectares. But you haveto start getting to big trans-basin systems. You aregoing to have to move water from water-surplusareas to water-deficit areas. These are going to bevery expensive investments.

"If you look at irrigationsystems being built inIndia today, the tech-nology in those systemswould be perfectlyrecognizable to a turn-of-the-century irrigationengineer."

Discussion 51

Yudelman: The strategy in most lending agencies now is not to invest in new damsbecause of the rising costs of new investment, the low price per output, and theproblems of implementation. The focus is now on the rehabilitation of existingsystems. That may be a mistake because it takes up to 15 years to develop a sizeablesystem, and you can create a hiatus. Haying said that, I think that in certaincountries - India is one of them - the dams will be built regardless of what is said. Ifyou look at the potential for expanding irrigation, the world's biggest irrigated areasare in China and India, the two most populous countries in the world, each of whichwill have 1.6 billion people by the year 2020. The potential for expansion in India isstill quite considerable. Even in China, you can

Svendsen: You pay for pumps on a per-horsepower basis in India. So it doesn'tmatter how long I run the pump. If it is 5 horsepower, I pay so many rupees.

Yudelman: That has been a big change.

Svendsen: It used to be metered. But, how shall we put it, the transaction costs andthe leakage were such that they couldn't continue that.

Groerifeldt: You are talking about public tube wells?

Svendsen: Private tube wells. Let me come back to this analogy with the electricaldistribution system. There are some similarities, but there are also some important dif-ferences. In this country, electricity distribution systems are organized as a regulatedpublic utility. It has to take in income and cover its own costs; its rates and rate ofprofit and so forth are regulated. That model has a good deal of promise in the devel-oping world, but it is not present yet in very many cases. The Philippines has experi-mented with it. You find cases scattered throughout China. You find it in some East


Asian countries. In general, that analogy is a powerful one because you have to focusnot just on the supply and demand questions but the way in which the supply agency isorganized so that it will respond to pressures for improving efficiency of use.

Rogers: I just want to go back to whether we need to think about big projects in thefuture. I don't see that, and I don't see it for the reasons that Peter Gleick said. It's anal-ogous to the energy sector. Nobody is building nuclear power plants, not because theyare bad environmentally, they stink economically. You can't afford to do them. This iswhat we are seeing with big dam projects or dam big projects. You cannot justify themin economics. Where you do see good returns are in small-scale groundwater devel-opment and small projects, which are all very local level, typically done by private in-dividuals and they are still not paying the true opportunity costs. They are not payingthe rent for the water, but they are paying the cost of capturing the use, and they tendto be very efficient. I think what we see is induced efficiency. That's what's going tohappen. Some of these big projects will linger on like Three Gorges Dam in China, butthat is the end of the road. We certainly won't see any big ones.

Blake: Isn't Three Gorges a bit different though? China has a "socialist" governmentthat doesn't feel it needs to be guided only by economic costs.

Rogers: I would say that there are some basic laws which apply whether it is Beijingor Kansas. I think if you price it right, Three Gorges doesn't look very good.

Yudelman: I think you have begged the question. You have stated as a fact thatlarge projects are less efficient than the smaller little ones. I say it is a hypothesis.

Gleick: I agree that the U.S. situation on the energy and the water side is not directlyanalogous to the international arena although we perhaps would like it to be. There aresome useful analogies. One of the problems is that international aid agencies that tendto fund large dam projects or large irrigation projects, don't, as a matter of course, lookat alternatives in the same way. They are not required to say, instead of spending $3billion on this dam project, what would $3 billion buy in some other small-scale pro-ject or water-efficiency projects, or something like that? The same question, inciden-tally, applies in international aid projects for energy. Now, for the first time the WorldBank is being forced to look at conservation investments in the developing world as analternative to a new 1,000 megawatt plant. They are beginning to fund conservationinvestments in developing countries, too.

The question: Why has progress been made in the energy area and how might it bemade in the water area? Part of it is that the environmental costs of massive fossil fuelprojects and big nuclear projects have become more evident. The economics of bigprojects has become less favorable. The nuclear industry likes to claim that environ-mentalists derailed most of these projects, but the reality in the United States is that itis the economics. Some people say it is because of all these regulations that environ-mentalists have imposed, but in fact that may or may not be true. The fact is the eco-nomics is not favorable. Public opposition is also very important. I think there is ananalogy there with major water projects internationally. It is slowing them down.

Discussion 53

There is also the question of reliance on imported supply. Countries don't like to bedependent on external sources of oil, and that has pushed the pursuit of more domesticalternatives and often renewable sources of supply. One might think about the extent towhich one is reliant on external sources of water. If Egypt's choice is insisting that theSudan build the Jonglei canal or that Ethiopia not build dams on the Blue Nile and iswilling to go to war for it, they might look instead at the cost of improving the effi-ciency of the water they are using now. There are other examples as well in Israel andthroughout the Middle East. It is a big question in many other parts of the world whereyour source of supply is outside your borders. It might be cheaper for a variety of po-litical reasons and military reasons to look internally first.

Rock: Haven't you left out the biggest factor on the energy side, which is the quadru-pling of energy prices. The impact of that on demand reduction in the U.S. has beenenormous. I don't know that there is an analog for water anywhere in the world.

Gleick: I didn't mention it because water is priced more often in the U.S. than it is inmost of the rest of the world. It is a powerful mechanism, absolutely. To the extent thatwater can be properly priced, or priced at all, that would be a major incentive toshifting.

Rogers: On that point, most people don't realize that water use in the United Stateshas gone down drastically.

Gleick: Slightly.

Rogers: We are using less than we were in the late 1960s.

Gleick: Slightly.

Rogers: Think about the growth in the economy since that period, water use per unitof output is way down-comparable to the reductions in energy. There are tremendouschanges and we haven't even started to seriously push the price. There is a long way togo in countries like the United States.

Seckler: I think the analogy with power is dead wrong. If I have an inefficient powersystem operating, the waste energy really is wasted. It's turned into heat and dissipates.If I'm wasting water in an irrigation system, that water is not going into evaporationmostly. It is going into some other use downstream, The whole trick of the matter is toask, if I improve the efficiency of irrigation in this dimension or water use anywhere,is that going to yield a net benefit over what I am losing somewhere else in this systemdownstream? Sometimes the answer may be yes and sometimes it may be no. Water isan entirely different substance in this regard.

Also in irrigation you probably have less chance for factor substitution in crops. Youcan't save much water by going down the yield curve. You are going to hit a yield andit takes so much water. If you take that water away, you will lose most of your yield. Itisn't, in my opinion, economically profitable to try to economize water by reducingyields in that sense. You can't substitute water for fertilizer very well. There is somemargin for that. So the factor substitutability is low.


The main thing that I fear is that even if there is some scope for gains in efficiency, arethey going to be anywhere near the amount that we need to meet these food productiontargets that I am talking about? Can we save enough water somewhere to double cropproduction in the world? That is the question we have to ask ourselves.

Gleick: That is an excellent question. I think you are wrong on the energy side.

Seckler: My answer to that is, yes, you can if you want to do what Peter Rogers doesand turn the market loose and we will get food prices up four or five times. Then, wewill reduce the demand for food and we will increase fertilizer use and we will meetour demand and we will lose maybe a billion people starving to death. The other solu-tion is that we march off into Brazil and put in some good road systems in NorthAfrica; we can meet that food demand by tearing up the forests and rangeland in NewZealand and North Africa. That may happen.

Yudelman: In a recent report by the Technical Advisory Committee of the CGIAR,where they brought all their resources to bear and took a look at the existing systems ofagriculture and the existing technologies, they simply said, if we applied what weknow best right now on what is available right now, we could produce enough food tofeed the existing population plus 50 percent.

Seckler: I've got a report by one of the greatest agronomists in Holland that showsthat there is about 100 times more potential than we could ever use.

Yudelman: This is quite different. He was saying under optimum conditions.

Levine: This is on a little different topic. If you deal with a $100-million project, youcome out with four volumes of feasibility studies by a consulting firm, and the onlyquestion asked is, is the country good for the $100 million? It makes it much easier onthe technical staff involved. At present, however, the banks are getting around that is-sue by going to sector programming and leaving it up to the countries to break the$100 million down into smaller units and smaller projects. Whether those projects arereally any better in that process, no one, as far as I know, has really evaluated. That isan important issue - whether the money currently being used in the sector approachesis achieving what is expected.

Sklar: I support Peter Gleick's analogy with energy. We are not talking about wast-ing energy. I don't think we are talking about wasting water. We are talking aboutwasting money. That is where they are analogous. Pacific Gas and Electric in Califor-nia is finding it is virtually cheaper to give people light bulbs and insulation than it isto buy and build new generating facilities. The City of Denver found that it is virtuallycheaper to buy and give people new toilets and shower fixtures than it was to build theTwo Forks Dam. This change is happening across the United States and other northerncountries, I believe. I am heartened by Peter Roger's optimism about the witheringaway of the big dam project. While that seems to be true in this country - in fact, wehave come to the point where we are taking down some very large dams like the oneson the Elwha River in Washington State in order to restore fisheries, which turn out tobe more valuable than the power, I don't see that happening around the world. The In-ternational Commission on Large Dams says that 200 large dams - 50 feet or

Discussion 55

higher - are being completed every year and that the kind of economic accountabilitythat has taken away the subsidies that drove many of the projects in this country hardlyexists in developing countries and the institutions we have been talking about. The in-centives for quantity over quality at the World Bank, for example, are very strong andare not withering away, though we do see some cracks in the facade as reports likeWapenhans' internal bank study illustrate the unsustainability of this.

Another point on large projects has to do with sustainability. One of the reasons wedon't see many big dams being built in this country is that the good sites are used up. Idon't think environmentalists can take as much of the credit, or of the blame, depending on your point of view, as is ascribed to themfor the demise of big dams in this country. Engi-neers say, if we only had a few more sites, wewould stay in business a little longer. Those sitescan be used up everywhere. Unfortunately, manyof these projects have a finite life and, on the sus-tainability issue, what are we going to do whenthese storage reservoirs are silted up? We can'tstore the water. Are we going to tear the damsdown, remove the silt, and build a new one there?Are people looking at the cost of decommissioning in the analysis of proposed pro-jects? Whether we allow every good site to be built in developing countries is still ahot topic. I think this is a top advocacy priority - bringing economic accountability todecision making, leveling the playing field so that the smaller alternatives can at leastbe tried. It is hard to analyze 100 $1-million projects. We have a lot of data on theproblems that come out with $100-million projects. Let's try these things and see whathappens. In a sense we don't have a lot to lose. We shouldn't let narrow institutionalconcerns get in our way, such as people at the World Bank saying, we don't have thestaff and it is a lot easier to do it this other way.

"This is a top advocacypriority-bringingeconomic accountabilityto decision making,leveling the playingfield so that the smalleralternatives can at leastbe tried."

Groenfeldt: I am glad that this discussion has shifted to the large versus small be-cause that is the repetitive theme at least among the donors who are still in irriga-tion—not AID. I agree with Monty Yudelman that the World Bank has already de-cided, at least in Africa, not to do large-scale irrigation projects. It has nothing to dowith the virtues or problems of large-scale projects. It has to do with the politics of theenvironmental community and the cost to the bank politically. We need to have a littlemore rigor in our discussion about how to compare them, if not to answer the question,then at least to pose the question more rigorously. Small projects lend themselves moreto local involvement—it is easier to find a national contractor to build a small damthan it is to find one to build a huge one—and to local participation in design decisionsand the eventual operation of them.

I am thinking of another case in Thailand, the Mae On Project, where an upstreamreservoir fed 11 downstream systems. Part of the project was to integrate themanagement systems, the human systems, and the irrigation leaders for each of theexisting downstream systems into a committee that advised the Royal Irrigation


Department on the operation of this medium-sized dam. You are not going to do that insomething on the scale of the Narmada or Three Gorges. So there are manydevelopmental payoffs and benefits to smaller structures because they can supportthings that I associate with development goals, such as local political self-reliance anddeveloping management among local people rather than the government bureaucracy. Idon't think they lend themselves to economic analysis. They do lend themselves todevelopment discussion. I would be happy if we ended the meeting with more sense ofwhat are the trade-offs or how to frame a discussion that tries to compare large versussmall, even if we can't answer it.

Meinzen-Dick: One barrier to many smallprojects for an agency like the World Bank is theneed for an institutional intermediary to handlethem. We need to be careful to ask, what is thatintermediary institution and does it perform anybetter than the irrigation bureaucracies? We knowthey have problems in the way they function and

with a lack of accountability. What about other institutions?

That brings me to an underlying theme: incentives for better performance. At eachlevel, what are the incentives for better performance of the irrigation institutions as awhole? Is financial autonomy the incentive that we need? What are the incentives fortechnological investment or conservation on farms? Is it water pricing and highervalue? A helpful angle of attack in thinking about how to achieve these changes is topay attention to how we make it in people's interests to make the changes that we seeare optimal.

"If we advocate notbuilding more largedams. we have to havesome altemative that isgoing to work."

Moore: Dave Seckler's question about whether the gains to be made through effi-ciency improvements are close to what we need to satisfy new demands is ultimatelythe real question. If we advocate not building more large dams, we have to have somealternative that is going to work. We still seem to have some basic disagreement aboutwhether alternatives will work or not and also a difference in perception about whetherthat is already happening or not. Some people say the World Bank is not building newprojects, and they are shifting their approach to rehabilitation. Someone else says, no,in fact they are building many new projects. I'm getting more confused rather than less.It seems we may not resolve this question of whether there are real water losses to berecaptured. There seems to be basic disagreement about that. I'm somewhat surprised.Even with that, what Ruth Meinzen-Dick said is key, which is, we need the incentivesfor better performance at all levels. We have talked about trying to get incentives with-in donor organizations so that there isn't the pressure just to lend even for projects thataren't going to be successful. I wonder whether people from the research communitysee that working with advocacy organizations can be valuable for turning their ideasinto pressure for institutional change. That is, from my point of view, where we are notworking together, even when we are talking about the same ideas.

Levine: In the Ogallala Aquifer - if that's stabilized after a number of years ofdecline - the analysis was that two-thirds of the reduction in the water use has come

Discussion 57

from areas going out of irrigation and one-third has come from improvements intechnology. That is in a situation with lots of monetary pressure because of the cost ofpumping. It has been the going out of irrigation that has made the major saving.

Gleick: I wouldn't say that is an argument against efficiency improvements.

Levine: That's what you are talking about and that puts you face to face with the foodissue.

Rogers: I want to get back to small versus large and the feeling that we didn't knowwhat is better. We do. In the United States, the average time to complete a big waterproject is 28 years from authorization to turningthe tap on the other end. Time is money in thesethings. Think about discounting. Think about try-ing to justify this using any reasonable projectevaluation technology. It doesn't matter how bigthe benefits are. At some point in the future, youare going to wait 20 years before you get them.Other countries are quicker building them - 10 or15 years is typical time to build a big project. Howlong does it take to build a tube-well project? A guy goes out with a drilling rig and 3months later he is pumping water. You get benefits right away. There is no question inmy mind that the big projects cannot be justified economically at the rates of returnthat we are seeing for food production.

Seckler: Nobody is going to argue against pump irrigation. Any time you can pump,do it and don't do anything else. Okay, we can clear that one out. The question is, whathas happened historically? For 20 to 30 years, we have had a worldwide policy in thedeveloping countries of keeping food prices down, for obvious political and humani-tarian reasons, by doing things like investing in irrigation and creating, if you want,surplus capacity in food production. That, combined with the developed countries' in-terests in protecting the farm block and dumping enormous amounts of commoditieson the world market, keeps prices down. The long decreasing trend in food prices inworld markets is easily explainable by the $100 billion per year of subsidies from theEuropean community and the U.S., the dumping practices, and deliberate overbuildingto keep food prices down. That is why these projects won't make economic sense ifyou assume that the prices are going to stay the way they are. What is going to happenvery quickly is that as we back off our subsidy and dumping programs and the WorldBank leads everyone into pulling out of fertilizer subsidies and irrigation, we will see acontinuous growth in food prices over the next few decades, which would then makethese projects look good.

"There is no question inmy mind that the bigprojects cannot bejustified economicallyat the rates of returnthat we are seeing forfood production."

Rogers: Even if it doubles the price.

Seckler: No, if the rate of growth of prices is the same as your discount rate, thenyou are okay. Six percent or whatever you want.

Rogers: Ten percent?


Seckler: Let's talk real terms: 4 percent. Then, everything looks all right. What I amsaying, in other words, is don't be deceived by the economics here.

One last point. The World Bank is just finishing an ex-post evaluation of their irriga-tion sector investments, and they find, much to their amazement, that their big projectsturn out to be better than their little projects. It is pretty much across the board, notonly in economics but in the performance and everything else.

Levine: Why?

Seckler: They don't know for sure, but the results are better in the larger projectsthan the small. As much as I like small projects,and I do, it isn't surprising because the cost perhectare or per unit of product in the small tankproject is two or three times what it should be in amedium-sized project, much less a large-sizedirrigation project, and the management, the hasslefactor, and the accidents you can have are a greaterburden. I love small projects and I think PeterGleick made some good points about why they aregood to do on other grounds, but economicallyspeaking there is no question they are more expen-sive than larger irrigation projects.

"The World Bank is justfinishing an ex-postevaluation of theirirrigation sectorinvestments, and theyfind, much to theiramazement, that theirbig projects turn out tobe better than theirlittle projects."

Gleick: Some of the environmental impact of hydroelectric dams and reservoirs is afunction of the energy produced by those systems - large systems versus smallsystems. As you might imagine it is very complicated - how you measure it, what youmeasure. I suspect, although this isn't my field, it is even more complicated forirrigation systems.

I want to say one more thing about efficiency. In the United States, in what was theSoviet Union, and in Western Europe, there has been a tremendous growth of GNP inthe last decade and a half without the same growth in water use. That decoupling forthe first time is a strong argument to me that we can produce more things with lesswater - that we are becoming more efficient in our water use.

It is an area ripe for study. How has it happened? Why has it happened? In California,industrial water use - water use per unit output of goods in specific sectors - has goneway down, not because the price of water has gone up all that much, but because thereis pressure on supply and water quality as well. There are a number of drivers, but thefact is that industrial use of water has become much more efficient in California evenwithout the economic incentive. There are technology substitutions. There are, in asense, input substitutions comparable to the energy field that I think are interesting tolook at.

Whether efficiency improvements are available in a sufficient quantity to meet futuredemands is an interesting question also. We have a project at the Pacific Institute tolook at efficiency improvements in different sectors and what that means for freeing upwater and how efficiency improvements should be separated from sectoral shifts. It is

Discussion 59

one thing to go to drip irrigation from flood irrigation. It is another thing to stopgrowing alfalfa in California and shift that water to a different crop or to shift that wa-ter to the urban sector. Those shifts also have the potential to free up a lot of water, butthen society has to decide how important is it to grow alfalfa. We may not be able toafford to pay for the water if we are fighting between the farmers and the cities. Thecities can pay a lot more for water. We may decide as a society that we would ratherhave the crops. Where does that cut off? Are we going to shift all the water to the ur-ban centers and not grow anything? Sooner or later you get hungry.

Ellis: Peter Rogers, on the point that the U.S. water demand has not substantiallygrown since 1960, why has that occurred? Is there anything applicable there to devel-oping countries?

Rogers: The World Development Report 19921 had an interesting hypothesis aboutresource use and environmental quality and GDP. It showed that there was a U-shapedcurve. It seems to work with almost everything. GDP keeps on going up. Resource useand pollution and things like that go up and go up and then they reach a peak and thenthey come down. Certainly the OECD countries show it, the U.S. shows it, even onthings like carbon dioxide, which is a surprise.

Levine: Except that the U.S. is a little blip at the end.

Rogers: Certainly. What it says is that for the developed countries and for countriesthat are up to a certain level, we will expect them to use less and less of the resourcesand keep on improving their GDP. It won't go on forever, obviously. The real problemis the countries below some critical income level that need to use more of everythingin order to get their consumption levels up to a situation where they can afford the lux-ury that you don't have to actually legislate environmental stuff. As people getwealthy, they choke on the atmosphere, which when they were poor they were quitehappy to breath. So what you see is a luxury. The demand for environmental servicesincreases once you go above a certain threshold level. This is what got Larry Summersof the World Bank into trouble last year when he said you don't have to worry aboutthe environment, worry about people's incomes. If you can get income in China above$3,000 per capita, lots of good things are going to happen worldwide with respect tothe environment. The trick is get there. What does it take to get there? Is it really$3,000? Can you actually shift it by doing some other things? One of the things is forus to export sufficient technologies to a society that is not ready to buy them, but tosay, we are going to give you these technologies and we are going to subsidize youruse of them because this is good for the environment.

There is also a disembodied technical effect. Capital stock is being replaced all thetime. If you are in China and you want to buy a paper plant, you don't buy a paperplant like the paper plants we have in Maine and in Georgia. You buy a Swedish paperplant. Why do you do that? Because it is very efficient. It produces paper and costs

1 World Bank, World Development Report 1992: Development and the Environment ( N e wYork: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992).


less. It also uses a lot less water and a lot less energy. So what you see is a substitution.Even without going out to save things, you are actually saving them.

Gleick: I would like to disagree with one aspect. China just bought technology tobuild refrigerators - a billion refrigerators - something absurd. The technology theybought was not the most efficient Swedish technology. It was a cheap technology thatturns out to use a lot of chloroflurocarbons and a lot of energy per unit of cooling.

Rogers: That's one technology. But in other technologies, the water-using ones, en-ergy is the thing that people look at. They don't look at water costs. It costs a hundred

times more to keep water than to buy it.

"Environmental NGOstend to be concernedthat large dams beingbuilt and the amountsof money they suck uphave a kind of totali-tarian effect on theirsocieties. "

Rock: Isn't another caveat that all of the breakingof the linkage between environmental quality andincome growth in that World Bank report was onthe industrial side? For agriculture, there was noth-ing in that report about breaking linkages.

Rogers: No. They just plotted the data they had.If you look at the water use, I'll bet that you wouldsee the same thing.

Yudelman: Another World Bank report about agriculture in the Middle East dis-cussed the impact of the shortage of water on the technology that is being used, and itshowed a definite shift to drip irrigation and other systems. It's there. It's taking place.

Parcells: Environmental NGOs tend to be concerned that large dams being built andthe amounts of moneys they suck up have a kind of totalitarian effect on their societies.An example is a dam being built in Nepal where the NGOs claimed that its cost wasfive times the GNP of Nepal. Their view was that in an effort to increase democracy inthese countries, it becomes a frightening problem that these mega-structures dominatethe economies and can suffocate a democracy, community participation, and so on.

Another issue on large dams is national security - national security meaning vulnera-bility to earthquakes or other types of natural disasters, plus the possibility of actualenemies coming in and destroying these large dams such as in South and North Korea.

As the chair of the Everglades Coalition, I have been spending much time working atthe major replumbing of the Everglades. In 1948, there was a Central and South FloodControl Project, which made investments in canal systems and pumping systems forprevention of floods but also for agricultural purposes. Ironically, there is now interestin taking the Kissimmee, which was channelized 20 years ago at the cost of $30 mil-lion, and putting it back into its natural state for $400 million. So in this cost issue, itseems to me that inherent in big dams is the possibility of big mistakes. At a timewhen you want to be more innovative and more flexible, large investments in thesestructures can have painful consequences 30 years down the line if you have to takecare of a particular problem. From a community development perspective, we wouldlike to see more Model T's and less large Cadillacs. I would like to see the World Bank

Discussion 61

and some of these other financial institutions find a mechanism to produce a lot ofModel T's and not the big Cadillacs.

Levine: The questions that I get when I raise some of these issues with governmentpeople overseas are: Would you give up Grand Coulee? Would you give up LakeMead? Would you give up the large dams that formed the basis for development in theWestern United States? I have a hard time answering those questions.

Gleick: Another way of asking that question is, is Phoenix or the system sustainable?What is going to happen in a hundred years to a place like Phoenix?

Levine: Nothing is sustainable to infinity. When you talk sustainability, you have toput a time frame on it. Is it sustainable for the next 25 years, for the next 50 years?What is a reasonable way for you to predict? So whether Phoenix is going to be here100 years from now, no one can answer.

Moore: But if you had the Gila River Indian community in this room or the Confed-erated Tribes of Warm Springs in Oregon, we probably would be having a very differ-ent discussion about that. They probably would say, yeah, we would give up thosedams. So there are other legitimate interests involved.

Gleick: It's a question of whose values count.

Levine: We have the same thing in talking with our Brazilian colleagues on sustain-able agriculture. They say, you can't even solve your Oregon spotted owl problem,what are you talking to us about the Amazon for? That is a hard thing to answer inthose countries.

Yudelman: On the large dam issue, I think each circumstance varies. There is alarge impoundment project taking place now in Lesotho. It is very mountainous andhas a large surplus of water that is running to the sea. The only export prospect is wa-ter. So that project, which is going to cost several hundred million dollars, is being de-signed to capture water to export it to South Africa. I believe the economic analysisshows that it is a feasible, sound project. I don't know how many years it is going totake.

Peabody: In reference to David Seckler's comment regarding project scale and im-pact, even if the World Bank report shows that bigger projects are better than smallerones, that may or may not mean anything. One of the things that is clear is that the big-ger the project is, the bigger the scare of disaster or of having it go wrong. Also, thesupervision and design investment will be much greater than in the smaller projects.Smaller ones are scattered: They are not supervised as closely as larger ones. They areoften make-work projects, and they are often not finished because they are the lastones to get scarce funds. So if it is harder to see the impact, I would say that is not sur-prising. Is that real or is that a part of the institutional culture - a reflection of thepriorities of the engineering establishment, rather than those of water users? The issueof what shows up to be better - bigger or smaller - depends on how you look at it.

Postel: I want to get back to the reasons the demand for water in the United Stateshas slowed and somewhat dropped back. In the U.S., it was a combination of slow

62 Wafer Scarcity in Developing Countries

downs in irrigation expansion in certain areas, but, probably more dramatically,changes in industry. In Japan, the United States, and Germany, we have seen dramaticincreases in water productivity in industry largely driven by pollution-control laws. Itbecomes more economic to recycle within the factory rather than to discharge wastewaterthat has to meet strict pollution-control standards. So, for example in Japan, wewere seeing $21 worth of output per unit of water delivered to industry in the late1960s and now we are getting $77 - a tripling of industrial water productivity in twodecades. The figures are similar for the United States and West Germany. You see thattrend pretty uniformly when you begin to adopt pollution-control standards incountries.

But look at water use globally. It has tripled since1950 and per capita use globally has increased 50percent. If you play out that trend and multiply it

by population, you are looking at a much quicker tripling than we have seen since1950. So where the inverted U begins to turn becomes a critical question with regard tothe environmental damage done in between the point where you are still increasingversus where it starts to turn down, given the increase in population we are going tosee between now and 2030. Can we get that change in the curve sooner or do we needto wait until you get an income level of $3,000 per person? Given the population mo-mentum we know we already have built in, that to me is problematic when you look atwhat that means for growth and water use globally in an absolute sort of way.

Just a quick point on the Phoenix issue. It is a good example of where the economicsof a large system hasn't played out well. Farmers in Arizona can't afford tap waternow. They are not able to pay for it. It is a huge government subsidy to a project that isnow not being used in the way it was intended.

"Nothing is sustainableto infinity."

Levine: I said when that decision was made that there wasn't going to be any of thatwater used for agriculture except by the native Americans. It was all going to end up inPhoenix and Tempe and so on. It was absolutely clear that the economics was going todrive it that way, even though agriculture was what people were talking about for therationale.

Seckler: I want to pass on a point of information on a technological change in bigdams, because it relates to the sustainability issue. I was talking to one of the WorldBank engineers who is working on the Three Gorges Dam, and I said, what are yougoing to do about sedimentation? He said, oh, don't you know, all the big dams that weare doing now have flushing systems. I didn't know this. Actually, in that one, they canin fact put tunnels underneath these dams and flush them out.

Gleick: The sediment stops hundreds of miles from the actual dam.

Seckler: I know that. Everybody knows that.

Gleick: Your engineer didn't know that.

Seckler: But your basic problem is when it starts working down to the dam. Prettysoon it gets in the turbines. That's when you stop. Right? What you do instead is flush

Discussion 63

out that dead storage spot periodically so you don't have to shut your dam down be-cause of it. It builds up where the backwater effect hits, obviously. That doesn't botheranybody.

Gleick: By the time it gets to the dam, the volume of the dam is gone.

Seckler: No. You flush out your dead storage capacity. The problem has been fillingup your dead storage.

Gleick: I would love to see the design. This is an experiment. It is a $20-billion ex-periment. It has not been proven to be effective yet.

Meinzen-Dick: David Seckler is so great because he throws out provocative com-ments even when he is not trying to be provocative. I am going to argue with an earlierone, which was the concession to Peter Rogers, saying that no one argues againstpump irrigation. Any time you can do it, do it. The Ogallala is a good example of whyyou should not always pump when you can. Saudi Arabia and Tamil Nadu in India arealso developing many problems. We need to think about the inter-connectedness ofpump systems. When you are pumping, you may need to then generate a canal systemto recharge your groundwater. And you certainly will need to have energy supply sys-tems, which have other environmental consequences. So I don't have anything in prin-ciple against pumping, but I think it has to be seen as part of a system and this goesback to where we need some hard information about the inter-connectedness of thesepieces.

Havener: In saying we would rather have many Model T's than a few Cadillacs, weneed to remind ourselves that we aren't the ones who make these decisions. It is thesovereign governments that make it. Our problem is how to influence them to wantmany Model T's rather than a few Cadillacs. Second, remember that they too havemanagement problems. At least they believe it to be easier to manage a few Cadillacsthan thousands of Model T's. It may not turn out to be right, but the guys that are sit-ting in the chair say, perhaps I can manage three systems, but I certainly can't manage3,000 systems. That's the reality as they view it.

Moore: Small cars are easier to fix yourself.

Havener: I agree with that, but the people who are making the decisions still arethose sitting there in the ministry of agriculture or irrigation in Islamabad, and they arethe ones that are dealing with the bankers. They are the ones that represent thesovereign government that is acquiring the loan.

Peabody: They are the same culture institutionally, as well. They represent the edu-cated urbanized elite, who believe they administratively should introduce the modernworld to their rural constituents, because they know that is best for them. They aremore like the international bankers than their poor fellow citizens.

Havener: Exactly. They are looking both at the upstream problems of how to dealwith the World Bank and downstream problems of how to deal with the farmers.


Gleick: That is a good point. The case of China stands out. They are not takingWorld Bank loans mostly and they have chosen to focus on building small dams,Three Gorges aside. They have built thousands and thousands of small hydroelectricdams over the last several decades and smaller irrigation systems, too, and managethem very well. They are a society in which decentralization has been very successful.

My other point is also a minor one. It has to do with consumptive use of water in theUnited States. For a book that is about to come out, I got the latest data from the U.S.Geologic Survey for 1990. Water withdrawals and the consumptive use, which is frac-tion of that, of course, went up continuously from the '40s through the '70s. In 1985,for the first time, consumptive use and withdrawals dropped. For 1990, it actually hasgone back up again. Consumptive use withdrawals, and to a lesser extent, consumptiveuse have slightly increased over the 1985 levels. Having said that, consumptive use perunit of GNP and consumptive use per capita have continued to drop.

Ellis: One might assume from the combination of the statements of Sandra Postel andPeter Gleick that we really ought to concern ourselves with industrial water use ratherthan agricultural water use because that is where the real potential for savings are. I'mnot sure that is right. It is artificial to separate agriculture from industrialization. Iwould say we have to look at industrial and agricultural development at the same time.

Postel: I didn't mean to imply that saving water in industry is more important than inagriculture. I was just attempting to explain the dropping off in the growth in water usein the United States. In terms of absolute water savings, I think they are larger in irri-gation, particularly if you are looking at consumptive uses. Agriculture is where theconsumptive use happens. There is only a tiny bit of consumptive use in most indus-tries, although you begin to change that if you move toward internal recycling.

I want to focus on Peter Gleick's energy analogy. We haven't said much on urban effi-ciency improvements and urban conservation. There are a number of cities in differentstages of development and in different cultural settings that have done very well withconservation as an alternative to traditional supply expansion. A good example isBoston, where there has been a 20 percent reduction in total water use in the last 5years, which has dropped the water use back to the level that it was in the 1960s andallowed the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority to delay building a new waterproject. They looked at a diversion from the Connecticut or Merrimack rivers versus aconservation program. The conservation program involved industrial water audits,fixing leaks in the distribution system, and retrofit, and a big price increase. Togetherthose measures were very effective at reducing demand. It was a way of meeting realneeds in the metropolitan area that did not involve the traditional approach of expand-ing the supply. You can look at similar examples in many cities now. We are not atthat point in developing countries. But when you look at the cost of a modern waterand wastewater system---on the order of $450 to $700 per person - to the extent thatbuilding efficiency into the systems from the start can reduce that figure and get morefrom the existing system, those costs are going to come down, allowing more people tobe served than would be from a traditional approach. Urban conservation is not some

Discussion 65

thing just for industrial countries. It can benefit developing countries from the start. Idon't think we have yet made that shift. It does change the demand projections.

Walker: Are there any negative trade-offs from conservation?

Postel: In an urban situation you are collecting water and storing it in a reservoirusually for distribution to a very concentrated demand in an urban setting. So, to theextent that you are relying on more efficient fixtures and more efficient industrial pro-cesses within that metropolitan area, the amount of water in that reservoir is going togo further. You won't need to go out and build another reservoir or have another diver-sion. You are getting more from what is essentially a fixed water supply system.

Levine: One potential problem that the water supply and sanitation people raise isthat the real use of water is transporting sewage. That's where the large volume is re-quired in urban areas. If you have sewers that are designed with flat slopes, you needcertain volumes of water to make them function.

Postel: I think we have enough examples where we have gone from the 5- or 6-gallon-per-flush toilets to the 1.6-gallon toilets without any terrible effect on thewastewater system.

Levine: But it does raise an interesting question for developing countries. We arefixed on this form of sewage handling. That is a tremendous investment in pipes andeverything else. We have technologies for in-site disposable sewage, whether they arein space ships or more mundane locations. If those kinds of units were produced in themillions, we don't have any sense of what the real benefit and cost would be of goingto a non-water transport system in towns and villages in developing countries.

Rogers: There are millions of septic tanks in the United States. Lots of countrieshave them. The problem is when you have high density use. I have lived in towns thathad septic tanks on 16 housing units per acre and it is very unpleasant.

Levine: That is what I said. There are other technologies that aren't explored. Wedon't relate to them.

Sklar: There are positive environmental impacts of this kind of conservation mea-sure. For example, in Cuemavaca, Mexico, where the water is treated, it was put intoleaky pipes and then contaminated by surface sewage runoff. Relining the pipes haseliminated that contamination and in certain parts of the city provided substantialhealth benefits. It was not done as a health measure, it was done to conserve the watersupply.

Moore: I want to summarize some of what has been said. Despite some plausible res-ervations about the gains to be made in conservation, whether it is wet water or not, wehave heard several examples, including the one Sandra Postel went through, in termsof urban and industrial conservation. Monty Yudelman mentioned the CGIAR reportthat said, given existing technologies and existing lands, we could be increasing pro-duction to feed a 50 percent larger population. We have heard of the decoupling ofgrowth and GNP with water demand. We've heard of some small-scale successes.There are many examples where serious wet-water gains can be made. If you combine


those advances at the beginning of the design phase for a project, and you say, okay ifwe do all of these, do we still need the mega-project? maybe the mega-project be-comes a medium project. Pak Mun Dam in Thailand is one case where, based on peo-ple's concerns and comments, they were able to revise the design. It still may not beperfect from everyone's perspective. In the Western U.S., if we knew everything thatwe know now about cost recovery, subsidies, fisheries, and equity with Native Ameri-cans, we might not have given up the big dams completely, but we might have de-signed them differently and built in certain operational standards for reservoirs, certainpricing systems, and certain technologies both in the irrigation sector and the urbansector that would have ideally made the impact of those dams smaller. The point is thatin countries where you are thinking of new capacity, let's bring all of this in at the be-ginning, so that we are not doing it 20 or 50 years after the fact, and let's give seriousconsideration to the alternatives that we have been talking about so that we can reapthose real gains. We need to create political and institutional change so that some ofthese things that we have been talking about get adopted. Are there practical strategiesthat we can use to do that?

Rock: We started a dialogue. What is the next step? Where did we seem to agree?Where have we apparently agreed to disagree? Most importantly, where do we go fromhere?

Seckler: One of the linchpins in this field is how much water actually gets saved.There has been some disagreement around here on that. I would be happy if we agreedin the future to think in terms of wet water and the dry water savings, and it may bethat the dry water is zero. We ought to get away from exclusively concentrating on thelocal efficiency and get to the basin level. Maybe I am wrong and maybe everybodyelse is wrong, but we can find out.

Rock: I would like to suggest that we get a bunch of these statements out and thenstep back from them and say, yes, that there is pretty much agreement there.

Blake: For example, there is strong agreement on the need for empirical data on theamount of irrigated land and its condition.

Sklar: The need for greater institutional accountability and transparency in thedecision-making process.

Gleick: Attaching a higher value to water and somehow transmitting that to theparties involved-not just the farmers but the parties involved.

Levine: I think that there was general agreement that there should be more effort incoming up with a variety of options for a given intervention.

Blake: From an institutional point of view, there is broad agreement about the needfor important qualitative and quantitative changes in the way the World Bank operatesin this field.

Rock: Let me reiterate what we've got now. One is that we begin to think of waterand water savings in terms of global rather than local systems and that we begin tothink in terms of wet and dry water. Two, there is a clear need for much better data

Discussion 67

about irrigated lands. Three, a need for greater interest in accountability andtransparency among governments and donors. Four, we need to attach, and find a wayinstitutionally to attach, a higher value to water. Five, whenever investment options areidentified, we need to spend a little more time identifying more alternatives. Six, whenit comes to outside institutional actors, we can't ignore the World Bank.

Svendsen: We seem fixated on the World Bank. For former bank staffers that is un-derstandable. For the rest of us, I'm not sure why that is. There are lots of other actorsin the game, from the regional development banks to, especially in the more developedcountries, local policy institutions, policy researchinstitutions, and other kinds of research groups.The focus on the World Bank implies that the onlyway to get the attention of policy makers is to twisttheir arms. I don't think that is entirely true. Policymakers are often themselves interested in change.They are anxious for ideas that can work. We don'talways have to twist people's arms. That meansthat we can look for other avenues besides theWorld Bank to have influence.

"The focus on the WorldBank implies that theonly way to get theattention of policy mak-ers is to twist theirarms. I don't think thatis entirely true. Policymakers are often them-selves interested inchange. They are anx-ious for ideas that canwork."

Moore: It is not just a question of arm twisting, itis a question of providing incentives for policymakers as well as water users to change theirhabits. It is not only the World Bank, it is many institutions. That brings up the need for a comprehensive effort to get new initiatives thatare all going in the same general direction, rather than one policy over here that iscontradictory and a different policy in another regional development bank, even in thesame country and the same river valley.

Castro: I agree on the need for more participation of local people that are actuallyinvolved and have impact on projects.

Groenfeldt: Another point of agreement is that investments that increase water sup-ply, like a new diversion, or investments that are supposed to enhance sufficiency, likea rehabilitation, need to be justified within the context of the entire watershed.

Warren: We have a tremendous amount of information that indicates that if youhave participatory approaches without understanding the existing knowledge, decisionmaking, and organizational structures, you might as well strike it off your rhetoric.This is not to say that we want to romanticize indigenous anything because there areobvious weaknesses and strengths in any system.

Levine: Agreeing with the objective, I don't know that that is the real problem. Theproblem is the institutional constraints against doing it. There is certainly a tremendousamount of rhetoric about water user participation in almost every country. I don't thinka lack of data is what is inhibiting the effective use. There are other constraints that areoperative.


Havener: In talking about getting to know more about irrigated agriculture on aglobal basis and on a specific basis, we need a good deal more differentiation in thesocioeconomic circumstances in which irrigation occurs, but we also need to knowmuch better the agroclimatic situation in which it occurs. There is a lot of comparativedata for Bangladesh and Pakistan for instance - one being in a high rainfall area withdeep clay soils and the other being a semi-arid desert with sandy soils. Directly com-paring the functioning of those two systems is ridiculous. Yet, it goes on all the time.We need a much better specification of the agroclimatic setting in which we are judg-ing the efficiency of irrigation investments and the effect of those investments or, forthat matter, their sustainability.

Gray: Many developing countries would just as soon skip the agricultural phase andgo directly to industrialization, if they could. It may be more important in the futurethan it is right now. They have an opportunity, which we have not had, to take advan-tage of a lot of these technologies. They can build them originally the right way insteadof building them the wrong way and then having too much invested to redo them - likehaving a separate system for potable water and non-potable water.

Groenfeldt: We need a better index than irrigation efficiency for what we are talk-ing about. I wonder about an analogy with the cropping index. We want something thatcan have a value greater than 1 to get at reuse. Maybe we want some number or somevalue that we can give for very wet water. Water that has been used many times shouldsomehow be recognized with a simple term that we can talk about. For example, ifwater has been used so many times it becomes saline and then it goes through a de-salinization plant and is used 10 more times, that seems to be a more thorough use ofthat water than in another case. Yet, we don't capture that with the irrigation efficiencyindex.

Rock: The water multiplier does capture the reuse.

Moore: But not environmental uses of water.

Rock: One thing that I thought you all would mention is, how large, if any, are the ef-ficiency gains?

Moore: Wasn't that related to the first part of wet or dry water? There was agreementthat the potential for water savings is important, but there is a disagreement about howmuch.

Yudelman: Would you define wet and dry?

Seckler: Let's say I'm a farmer and I'm using water on my farm at 50 percent irriga-tion efficiency. So 50 percent of it is leaving my farm into the groundwater or the sur-face water. Now, I buy a drip system. My efficiency goes up to 80 percent. Now, only20 percent of the water is leaving my farm. Right? But the question is, what is the gainin efficiency globally? If that water that has left my farm is rushing off to the sea anddoesn't do anybody any good whatsoever, then I have increased the global efficiency.But, let's say that somebody downstream of me has been using that 50 percent of thewater that left my farm. Now, when I improve my efficiency, that person is getting less

Discussion 69

water from the return flow. So that percentage that his amount of water decreases isdry water and there is no net gain to the system.

Moore: It is the difference between project efficiency and basin efficiency.

Gray: I don't think it is correct to say that it doesn't benefit anybody. There may beecological values.

Seckler: No, I mean any value. I'm not distinguishing between farmers or birds oranybody. Whatever is of beneficial use.

Postel: If there are no gains from efficiency, that means that there is no value placedon in-stream uses.

Moore: I guess my definition is more that wet water gains are those recaptured gainsfrom formerly lost consumptive uses. If you are gaining something that wasn't con-sumptively lost before but it showed up somewhere else, then that is not a true gain.That is what I would call dry water. The true reduction in overall consumptive use sothat you have more water is a wet gain.

Seckler: You can have both kinds. If you are wasting water nobody is using, thenrecapture it: You get a wet water gain.

Gleick: It is a question of whether there is a zero sum or a non-zero sum.

Seckler: At the global level. Exactly.

Rock: I think the easiest way to think about it is a project versus basin.

Seckler: Yes. A little bit or the whole picture. That is the gist.

Levine: There is another element, does the route of travel make a difference? Cer-tainly, in environmental terms it can make a difference.

Seckler: Absolutely.

Sklar: If the additional environmental benefits are energy savings or something else,does that make it wet, or is it still dry, but a little wetter than really dry? It seems a lit-tle slippery.

Seckler: We are not talking about its value so much as the quantitative flow in thesystem. Then, you can put on the values, too.

Levine: Sometimes you can get a worse situation. In the Nile, some of the water thatpresumably is available is being put on higher lands that are very sandy. The seepagefrom them is now causing drainage problems on the higher valued land down below.So by getting that extra use out of the water, they have actually made the environmen-tal situation and the agricultural situation worse. Now they want to put in pumps for adrainage project on this waterlogged land instead of saying, we are not going to put ir-rigation water on those high lands.

Moore: I want to understand the relative emphasis that people place on the potentialfor gains through not building new projects versus the emphasis on, we've got to build


new projects, so that I can better understand how development dollars should be spentin the most efficient, effective, and environmentally sound way.

Postel: It seems that the disagreement is how much the analogy to the energy sectorreally applies to water. How much is to be gained through efficiency improvements? Iargue that there is a lot to be gained through efficiency improvements.

Rock: The global efficiency argument says that there is very little to be gained.

Seckler: If it's a closed system - that's why it is important. If the efficiency argumentis right, we certainly don't need to build much new capacity in the water field. We

agree on the fact that we don't know quantita-tively how much this is. We need to estimate that.Moore: Where we split is how optimistic or pes-simistic we are about the gains. We agreed thatthere are some gains. We don't know exactly howmuch they are and we don't know exactly whatthe benefits of the gains are, and some of us thinkthat gains that you get may be more important for

environmental purposes because of the route of travel, and others think that the basinefficiency is going to stay the same and those parts don't matter so much.

Blake: It looks like this falls within the area of disagreement rather than the area of

"There are lots of riversin the world that in thedry season are spewingout water that could beused to good purposefurther upstream."

agreement.

Levine: The benefits from maintaining in-stream flows and so on - those values canbe very high. That becomes again a very site-specific situation. If you are in the humidtropics and in what is a run-of-the-river situation, where you don't have much opportu-nity to store the water, it runs off to the sea. You get a low efficiency. But that doesn'tmean anything. The fact that most traditional systems in Asia operate at 30 percentwater efficiency doesn't have any significance because they couldn't do anything withthat water in irrigation terms anyway. So it has no value. In the dry season, you rarelyget efficiencies of that order. They are frequently much, much higher. Many of the av-erage water efficiencies on irrigation systems that you hear about are misleading. Youhave to think about the site from which each one of those sets of data come.

Rock: This suggests the peak load problem in power plants, where in the flood seasonyou get a lot of low efficiencies because you don't need it, and in the dry season, highefficiencies because you have to use every damned drop.

Gray: Where you have to look at it globally is where there is a net gain. If you look atthe total amount of fresh water in the world, everybody agrees there is plenty. It is themaldistribution - not having the right quantity where you want it, when you want it.That gets back to the local versus the larger approach.

Seckler: I just meant globally in a river-basin sense, not the whole world.

Groenfeldt: The way to conceptualize where there is potential and where there isn'tis to imagine ourselves at the river mouth during the dry season. If there is more water

Discussion 71

flowing down than we need to sustain the river ecosystem and to keep saltwaterintrusion out, there is potential for development upstream. Then we have to ask, isthere any demand for it upstream? I think we have been led astray by this Nileexample. There are lots of rivers in the world that in the dry season are spewing outwater that could be used to good purpose further upstream. We can't deny that there isstill much potential for further irrigation development. What we are saying is that wecan't assume that there is potential for further irrigation development. We have to askthe question.

Rock: That is part of where we disagree, I think. What else?

Moore: Also there is the question of timing. Some of us believe that even if the effi-ciency gains aren't as big as we hoped, that if you implement them you have the abilityto change the kinds of new supply projects that you may need because they will reduceoverall demand in the longer term.

Yudelman: In other words, if you have demand management now, you can reducethe supply later on?

Moore: Even if the gain isn't as big as you thought it would be, you might have had todelay your large capital investment for 10 or 15 years and have had the opportunity toinvest the capital in something else. That is what I mean by the timing.

Blake: I think we all agree that is important to know. Second, we agree that that hasto be determined empirically on at least a watershed basis.

Levine: There is some support for that idea-even in the way many projects are de-veloped. The larger ones, particularly, are developed in stages. You always have ex-cess water during the early part of the project - the first 5 years or whatever. If youdon't restrict the flow at that time, if you give plenty of water to those first users, in ashort time it becomes a right. Then it becomes difficult to accommodate the rest of theproject.

When IRRI was founded, they put in a lot of pumps and they weren't very efficient inthe way they used the water for producing rice. So the water in the drain went into asmall creek that went down into one of the villages. About 2 years later, they had amajor power failure and the pumps were off for 3 or 4 days. A delegation of farmerscame up and complained that IRRI was stealing their water because they had gotten tothe point where that excess drainage from the IRRI farms was considered their supply.So it is very easy to establish a perceived right to the water.

Looking ahead in terms of the way systems are implemented or in terms of the urbanareas anticipating demand is a good practice generally.

Peabody: It's never done.

Levine: No, even though they know it. In the ones we have worked with, we havesaid, this is going to happen. You are going to have trouble with your water users.That's extra management.


Rock: What else do we want to put on this list? I heard disagreement around the eco-nomics of big dams.

Seckler: At least in some of the more densely populated areas, probably India andChina, we are going to need big dams. I think most people don't agree with that. As asubset of that, there is probably some disagreement over whether small dams can re-place the big ones. That is an important issue that we would probably disagree about.

Levine: In the Soil Conservation Service small watershed program, there was a bigdam, small dam controversy. The arguments against large dams were based on theflooding of lowland valleys and the loss of prime land. The counter-argument said thatthe upland dams, the so-called small dams, flooded valleys, too, some of which werealmost as valuable in terms of agricultural production as the larger valley lands. Therewas no general consensus on the basis of those 50 pilot watersheds that the upstreamhad any less environmental damage than the downstream. On the other hand, theysolved different problems. They agreed that in some sense that the downstream floodprotection measures were necessary and the benefits from the upstream were aboutequal to the downstream anyway. So they did both.

Moore: The fact that many small dams inundate more area than one big dam is not, Ithink, the only consideration.

Levine: It isn't obvious when you commence.

Rock: I have now four areas of disagreement. One is lack of clarity about how largethe system-wide efficiency gains are in a given watershed or ecosystem. Two, there isclear disagreement about whether big dams are needed and about whether small damscan replace big dams. Deborah Moore's timing issue is a corollary of those, too. If youneed big dams, then this timing issue of doing demand management probably doesn'tmake much sense, and there is an area of disagreement there that you can demandmanage so you wouldn't need the big dam in the short run and hopefully that wouldslow the growth of demand and, at least as I understood it, that would help forego theneed for big dams in the long run.

Moore: No. It would forego the need for large dams in the short term and maybe turna large dam into a medium dam.

Sklar: Not just small versus large dams. It could also be irrigation projects and soforth.

Levine: I don't know if there is any disagreement with that. At least not on my part.

Moore: Which?

Levine: The idea that in some way looking at the demand side won't delay and there-fore leave options open for the future. That's what you are saying. You are leaving theoptions open rather than committing yourself early.

Seckler: You've got to remember a big dam has a 25-year horizon, so that if theseprojections of food demands for 2030 are valid, we are going to be there about the timea dam commissioned today would be ready to start meeting those demands.

Discussion 73

Moore: Sometimes a large dam will take away the opportunity of doing some of theother small things. If you do some of the small things now, that may mean that yourdemand projections for large systems were not right.

Rock: In one statement David Seckler says that we are going to need big dams in In-dia and China, then your timing issue goes by the wayside. He is saying it is not atiming issue. You are going to have to do it now or you are going to have to do it later.

Seckler: Even if you do it now, it is going to take about that long to get them onstream. That is why I feel a little bit urgent about it.

Postel: In the energy sector, we have overcapacity now because we didn't understandthe potential for demand reduction. So we built all these big supply capacity systems inenergy, which now we don't need. That is a flag to me to say, let's look at what we cando with demand management before we make these huge investments in water supply.

Rock: Whether or not the power model is a good analogy is another area ofdisagreement.

Levine: There is another aspect. You have two opportunities to increase supply inagriculture. One is the supply of irrigated land. The other is the actual yield per unit ofwater. With energy you don't have that option very much because the efficiencies werealready so high in power production. You do have a little more flexibility if you havefaith in plant breeders and you can feel a little more comfortable about delaying the in-vestment.

Postel: That is an area where we do need to know more, because irrigation expansionnow is at half the rate it was in the 1950s and 1960s and per capita irrigated area hasbeen declining for 14 years now. We are in a different framework than we were whena lot of these large projects got going before. What are we doing about that? How doesthat change our framework for meeting food needs with regard to investments and irri-gation expansion versus irrigation productivity versus rainfed?

Levine: We ought to be worried. There's no question about it.

Havener: You have a fundamental and serious disagreement. On one hand, manypeople believe, we have had and are going to have food coming out of our ears and onthe other hand the next three people say people are going to be starving.

Blake: Food coming out of their ears from where? The United States and Europe?

Yudelman: Coming from Eastern Europe certainly.

Blake: But how are people from developing countries going to pay for it? You've gotto think about it.

Yudelman: Yes, but we are talking in an economic context. Of course, I think aboutit. As somebody over here said, I don't want to be responsible for a billion peoplestarving. What are you telling me? That you want to increase to satisfy everybody's ba-sic needs by expanding irrigation?


Blake: I'm saying that if you have all this food in the United States and Eastern Eu-rope and there is a deficit in the developing countries, their people have got to buy it.What are they going to use in order to pay for it?

Meinzen-Dick: What I was going to say as a point of disagreement before this cameup is: Is the transfer of water from the agricultural sector to "higher" value uses a goodthing? I think that is a point of disagreement.

Yudelman: How can we agree on pricing?

Moore: Today was basically worthless. We don't agree. We're going back to the fun-damental things that we talked about this morning, which I thought we had madeprogress on.

Rock: That's not true at all.

Seckler: We have parallel agreements and disagreements.

Moore: David Groenfeldt said you can stand at the mouth of the river and in manycases say that there are large increases in water use that could happen upstream. I amwondering how much agreement there is on the need to protect water-dependentecosystems.

Levine: The river that David is standing at the end of is typically in humid areaswhere the water doesn't have a great deal of value anyway. I would like to hear someexamples of large rivers flowing through arid regions where this is the case during thedry season. Take the big ones - the Ganges, the Nile, the Colorado - you don't havemuch water coming out the end. It is only in the humid regions where we don't need itso much for agriculture.

Groenfeldt: If you are willing to entertain big dams, then you would want to standat the mouth of the river throughout the year and see if there is any water coming outand how much. Then you would calculate how much you need for whatever value youplaced on the riverine environment. As was brought out, big dams will store water overa period of years. So you don't have to worry about dry seasons.

Seckler: One of the reasons I tilt toward big dams is because of long-term storagecapacity. You can pick up your flood-season flow and use it for flow augmentation inthe dry season. It might be feasible to go up to headwaters of the Niger and put in largestorage dams as ecologically safely as you can and regulate the dry-season flow. Thatwould capture the flood during the wet season, which also creates havoc along theNiger. So you can stabilize that and protect wetlands habitats by augmenting dry-season flows.

Moore: But weren't the wetlands doing okay with the natural hydrology?

Seckler: That's right, but the dry-season flows are getting lower and lower. There-fore, the wetlands are getting hit in the dry season.

Discussion 75

Parcells: There is a mixed record on that. Water timing is very important to aquaticecosystems. In the Everglades, 90 percent of the life forms are absolutely gone becauseof lack of flows, largely because they are diverted to the oceans.

Rock: It sounds like there is an agreement on protecting ecosystems, but a disagree-ment around means.

Rogers: On the issue of protecting the in-stream flows and wetlands, it depends onwhat it costs and what the benefits are. Dale Whittington did some calculations thatshowed that it would be much better for the Euro-peans to pay the Egyptians not to build the JongleiCanal because it is in an important flyway for theEuropean bird populations. For a small amount ofmoney, relative to the cost of building thatcanal - it's in the low hundred million dollars fortotal cost and maintaining the thing - Europe couldpay Egypt not to grow cotton or wheat or whateverthey are going to do with the extra water. It is amuch more efficient use of the money to do that and solves the environmental problemvery nicely.

Svendsen: Water rights can be transferred to allow that kind of bookkeeping andthat kind of payment to take place.

"Irrigation expansionnow is at half the rate itwas in the 1950s and1960s and per capitairrigated area has beendeclining for 14 yearsnow. "

Sklar: That is an important thing to bring up, going back to where do we agree. Twoout of the three groups brought up property rights and equitable and accountablesystems.

Levine: That is a difficult area. I don't disagree with you, but New York City, for ex-ample, purchased the riparian rights for water in the l800s all the way up to its source.So its water is not filtered - it is some of the best water in the world. At present, how-ever, EPA has a regulation that says that the water will have to be filtered because ofdisease potential, or New York City has to have a plan that restricts development in thewatershed area. For New York it is a $2 billion investment in filters and an operatingcost of $200 or $300 million dollars a year. So their approach is to restrict develop-ment in the watershed. There are many people living in the watershed who don't wantany restrictions. One could argue that if those people are willing to pay the $200 mil-lion a year operating costs, it will be okay for New York. That is not considered. Theydon't want to do it. I'm not sure how willing the developed countries are to pay forprotecting the environment, and I am not sure whether Europe will be willing to pay onan on-going basis the value of that water as Egypt perceives the value.

Svendsen: We had that with the buyback of debt at a discount in various countries.There is no reason that you couldn't translate that concept into water.

Rock: Let's turn to the last issue, which is, where do we go from here? You were allinvited as a way of beginning a dialogue between developmentalists and environmen-talists. It's not the right distinction, but it is a distinction. We talked about how we de-fined the problem, what we saw as the priorities, what strategies we thought made


sense, and where we think we agree and where we disagree. Ultimately, the funda-mental question is not only, (a) was this a useful dialogue? but, (b) do we want to keepthe dialogue going and, if so, how?

Blake: We must keep up the dialogue among the concerned parties and we must gen-erate better information to make that dialogue more decisive.

Rock: I sat here and most of the time I couldn't figure out whether the disagreementswere over facts or whether they were over values. To the degree to which they are overfacts and the facts are unknown but knowable, it seems to me that one useful thing todo is to engage in some research done jointly by advocacy organizations and researchorganizations, so that there is joint ownership in the outcome. Some shared under-standing can come from that.

Seckler: What you have just said is the most pleasant outcome of our meeting. Asfar as I can detect, there isn't any disagreement at all about values. There is morecommonalty of values and weights on values in this group than I would have thought.We all agree that we need to feed people. We may not know how much that means.We have to protect these wetlands. We have to do all of this. We have found that vir-tually all the disagreements we have are empirical in nature. I have one hypothesis andsomebody else has some hypothesis. The interesting thing is that those are empiricalhypotheses. They are things you can get data on. It is a situation that leads to researchthat can actually do some good. You are not going to do more research just to be doingit. More research can resolve some of these big problems by getting some quantitativeestimates on the things we have been discussing. I think that is great.

What do we do in the future? I don't know if we have to decide that, but one of theideas that we have kicked around was that perhaps after this meeting and after givingourselves time to think more deeply about the issues and trying to find some facts, ifwe can, we could come back on this subject at a later date.

Groenfeldt: I support creating and constituting ourselves into some kind of workinggroup, not just doing a little study over the next 6 months on our own, but somethingmore formal than that. It would be valuable at the present time when World Bank wa-ter policy and water seems to be very much in the air. The bank is also talking about aregional irrigation strategy. I think one of the reasons that we agree so much on valuesis that we don't have the facts to identify where our values diverge. I think if we did alittle research, we would come back in 6 months and have more to argue about onmore of a value basis. This group is the right mix to do participatory research thatwould carry some weight because of who does it.

Moore: My interest is in building a broader, stronger, more effective, and forcefulconstituency for various policy and institutional changes. That's what an advocacygroup does. We have agreed that institutional changes are desirable in many areas andthat that has to do with politics and many other things. My interest in having more per-sonal contact with the research community is to be able to use the research in the advo-cacy process. It is not only a matter of doing collaborative research. I think the peoplethat do research are good at doing that. Maybe the advocates aren't so good at it. Or,

Discussion 77

maybe they are, but they don't want to do it. I'm not sure that we should all changewhat we do. Again, my interest is in developing some idea of the areas where we agreeso that we can support each other in those areas. My interest is in having formal or in-formal conversations with all of you over a longer period of time to see whether thereare ways that we can support each other in our work.

Levine: There was a precedent to this sort of group and that was the ADC Researchand Training Network, which provided a vehicle for getting those interested in partic-ular problem areas together on a regular basis so that you started talking the same lan-guage and crossing disciplines, and so on. You started to understand where others werecoming from and how to speak to each other and the understanding increased verysubstantially. Those were very useful activities. That is a model that suggests comingtogether occasionally will work. We probably have to define the areas for discussion alittle more sharply than we have at the present. For example, one where I think there isagreement is this question of how decisions are made with respect to activity. Even ifwe don't agree on what those answers will be, I think we all have to agree that the pre-sent system of making decisions about water projects is not appropriate either from theresearchers standpoint or certainly from the advocacy standpoint. You could have ameeting that focused on that kind of issue, where everyone did a little homework abouttheir perception of the present process, what changes would be desirable, and then howthose changes could be encouraged. We could do our homework and come back 3months later and have a discussion that centered on 1 or 2 of those issues rather thanall 6 or 8 or 10.

Rogers: I like the idea of giving homework. David Seckler's point is that we agreedto articulate our disagreements. I think that the homework ought to be some writtendocuments and to actually pick the issues - irrigation efficiency and things like that.We could do a little research paper with a couple of people getting together or havetwo different groups write something on big projects versus small projects. There isliterature on that. There are data. There are conceptual models. Then you would start todiscover where you don't understand, or whether the disagreement is there. That's nicehomework. We can grade it.

Svendsen: I was surprised to find out how many lobbying groups or interest groupshave some interest or activity in the international arena. It says that people who do re-search can't afford to ignore, or even practitioners can't afford to ignore, this group ofpeople, but also how similar many perspectives are. I agree with the point about theseparation of interest and comparative advantage. It is a mistake to try to merge theinterests of these two groups too closely. Researchers are supposed to be skeptical. Weare supposed to ask questions. You would be rotten lobbyists if you stopped all thetime and said, gee, is this really what I want to say and is this really true? Youwouldn't do a good job that way.

Moore: Maybe a twist on that is if someone is doing a particular piece of researchthat they feel may be valuable for political reasons or for institutional change, now thatthey know who we are, they can send it to us. And if we have a particular projectcoming up where there has been opposition or debate over technical or economic issues,


now that we know who you are, we can call you up and say, what's your expertopinion?

Havener: I have found the discussion stimulating. Anyone interested in global foodsecurity and long-term economic development has to be concerned about these samesets of issues. I am delighted that we were able to play a modest role along with Debo-rah Moore in bringing this group together and getting the dialogue started. It is clearlyone that is worth continuing if we can figure out ways to make it rewarding to you andeffective to the outside audiences that we have been talking about.

One of the things that crossed my mind is whether or not we have all of the importantactors here, either from the advocacy standpoint or from the researcher standpoint. Itseems to me that water law, and knowledge about water law, is one area that is missingin our dialogue today. Such lawyers might bring a peculiar set of skills to the discus-sions, and they often force us to think more clearly and enunciate our positions morespecifically. That is useful especially as it relates to a subject like water.

Gil Levine mentioned the ADC Research and Training Network - an important andinteresting experience of Winrock International in an earlier incarnation - and it didlead to important conclusions and important research papers that sensitized many pol-icy advisors, if not policy makers, on important issues.

The advocacy community, it seems to me, can learn from Ambassador Blake and someof the things that he has been doing. I would argue that Ambassador Blake is one ofthe most effective people on the Washington scene today in talking about trade-offs onagriculture development and environment issues. He has achieved this status byputting together one of the most informal networks I have ever seen. At the organizingmeeting, which was held some time back, people like yourself sat around the table anddiscussed these issues. They decided to form an advocacy group. It is an informalcoalition of people that are concerned about similar issues. Ambassador Blake is ableto speak and write on behalf of a coalition of people that share common concerns. Todate there are no membership fees. There is no statement of common purpose that weare required to sign. Bob sends out papers and says, if you disagree with this, let meknow. If you agree with it, let others know. He has become very effective in that pro-cess. Both in the ADC Research and Training Network and the Committee on Agri-culture Sustainability experience, there was at least one key person that had both timeand interest to perform a leadership function and to help coordinate the effort. So whilewe can talk about getting together on an informal basis and defining research projectsand identifying funds to support them, you do need to think about leadership and sus-tainability over time. Otherwise, this will likely be just another unsustainable group.

Rock: Let's close by thanking all of you for coming. I have rarely sat in a day-longworkshop where there has been as much sustained enthusiasm. That was quite nice tosee. Second, thank you to our hosts Winrock and EDF. Third and finally, it seems tome that you all have provided a basis for an ongoing dialogue.

ParticipantsRobert O. Blake is chairman of the Committee on Agriculture Sustainability for Develop-ing Countries at the World Resources Institute and has had a long career in environment, waterresource management, policy, and diplomacy.

Gonzalo Castro is executive director, Wetlands for the Americas, which focuses on theprotection and restoration of wetland habitats in North, South, and Central America.

Jim Ellis is director for Environment and Sustainable Agriculture at Winrock International.Formerly he was with the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University.He specializes in multidisciplinary ecosystem-level studies aimed at exploring the interfacebetween environment and development.

Peter Gleick is director, Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Se-curity. The Pacific Institute researches the linkages among economic development, global envi-ronmental problems, and international security. He has directed studies regarding the impactsof global climate change on water resources, the security conflicts arising from transboundarywater disputes, and strategies to combat drought and water scarcity.

Don Gray is senior fellow and water program director at the Environmental and EnergyStudy Institute. EESI briefs Congress on issues related to environment, energy, and sustainabledevelopment. He was instrumental in getting Congressional support of U.S. involvement in theU.N. Earth Summit.

David Groenfeldt is a senior associate with Associates in Rural Development, a privateconsulting firm providing services in the areas of agriculture, natural resources, energy, ruraldevelopment, and environmental affairs. He has researched irrigation issues in South andSoutheast Asia focusing on institutional aspects of irrigation management.

Robert Havener is president of Winrock International. Prior to Winrock, he was directorgeneral of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, worked for theFord Foundation in Asia, primarily in Pakistan, and then was responsible for the foundation'sAsian agriculture program. He has also worked in the Middle East and North Africa on theArid Lands Agricultural Development program, funded by the Ford Foundation.

Bruce Larson is a visiting fellow in Winrock's Center for Economic Policy Studies, on leavefrom the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Gilbert Levine is professor emeritus at Cornell University and a senior associate for the In-ternational Irrigation Management Institute. He is a consultant on issues concerning irrigation,the environment, and development.

Ruth Meinzen-Dick is a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Insti-tute. She is currently working on socioeconomic aspects of irrigation performance in India,Pakistan, and Zimbabwe.

Deborah Moore is staff scientist, International Program, Environmental Defense Fund. EDF

advocates reform of the multilateral development banks lending practices toward more socially

and environmentally sound development. She has conducted research on the cost effectiveness

of small-scale irrigation projects in India, trends in World Bank investments in the water sector,

and technical critiques of water projects financed by multilateral development banks.


Steve Parcells is director, International Water Program, National Audubon Society. He fo-cuses on the impacts of water development on wetlands and water-dependent habitats both inthe U.S. and overseas. He has advocated changes to the Bangladesh Flood Action Plan, and re-cently, as chair of the Everglades Coalition, organized a conference on the restoration of theFlorida Everglades.N. S. Peabody, III, Winrock International, is chief of party for the Environmental and Nat-ural Resources Policy and Training Project technical assistance component. Before joiningWinrock, he held the position of senior water management specialist in the Bureau for Asia andthe Near East, USAID.Sandra Postel is vice president for research at Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit researchinstitute focused on global environmental trends. She has published widely on internationalwater issues.

Mike Rock is senior vice-president of the Institute for International Research. He is a devel-opment economist with extensive experience in Asia, and teaches economics at BenningtonCollege.Peter Rogers is professor of environmental engineering at Harvard University. He has pub-lished widely on improved methods for managing natural resources and the environment, withemphasis on the use of analytic optimizing methods to incorporate both the natural phenomenaand the engineering controls.David Seckler is the director of the Center for Economic Policy Studies and the Water Re-sources and Irrigation Policy Program at Winrock International. He is professor emeritus ofagricultural economics at Colorado State University. He has spent 7 years working in Asia andrecently has been working on African economic development.Leonard Sklar is research director, International Rivers Network, which is dedicated toprotecting and restoring the world's rivers through promoting sustainable development alterna-tives, networking with NGOs worldwide, and providing information on water-related projects.He has studied the impacts of the World Bank-financed Bangladesh Flood Action Plan.Mark Svendsen is a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute witha joint appointment at the International Irrigation Management Institute. He has focused on ir-rigation systems and performance in Sri Lanka, India, the Philippines, and Zimbabwe.Frank Tugwell is vice president for programs in the Washington D.C. regional office ofWinrock International. He was formerly director of the Renewable Energy and the Environ-ment Program and Environmental Enterprises at Winrock International.Vicki Walker is a program associate in the Center for Economic Policy Studies, WinrockInternational and participates in the Water Resources and Irrigation Policy Program. She alsomanages the African Rural Social Sciences Research Networks program at Winrock.Michael Warren is a professor of anthropology at Iowa State University and has studied in-digenous agricultural practices and their potential. He is director of the Center for IndigenousKnowledge in Agriculture and Rural Development.Chris Wozencraft works in Winrock's Center for Economic Policy Studies. He has studiedendangered species in Madagascar and has worked on biodiversity training and research pro-grams in China during the last 5 years.Montague Yudelman is a fellow at the World Wildlife Fund. He was formerly director ofagriculture at the World Bank

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