Abstract
The coming agenda for the European Common Agricultural Policy includes more incentives for the environmental compliance of farmer’s activities. This will be particularly important in the case of water risk management in Mediterranean countries. Among the new challenges is the need to evaluate some of the instruments necessary to comply with the Water Framework Directive requirements that emphasize the management of water demand to achieve the environmental targets. Here we analyze the implications of changing water rights as a policy response to these challenges. We analyze two important aspects of the decision: (i) the effects on the crop productivity and efficiency and (ii) the effects on the rural income distribution. We provide the empirical estimations for the marginal effects on the two considered aspects. First, we calculate a stochastic frontier production function for five representative crops using historical data to estimate technical efficiency. Second, we use a decomposition of the Gini coefficient to estimate the impact of irrigation rights changes on yield disparity. In our estimates, we consider both bio-physical and socio-economic aspects to conclude that there are long term implications on both efficiency and social disparities. We find disparities in the adaptation strategies depending on the crop and the region analyzed.
Highlights
Due to the increasing water conflicts among sectors induced by climate change, the crop response to water pressure is one of the main concerns of climate change adaptation policy [1,2]
We focus on the analysis of the implications of water demand reduction for agricultural use based on the decrease of irrigated areas, taking into account Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reforms and other related variables
Our analysis considers two economic aspects: (a) First we analyze the changes in the efficiency of the agricultural systems through a stochastic frontier production function at the base of historical data for the Ebro basin in Spain; (b) Second, we explore the distributional aspects computing the marginal effect of changes on irrigated area over incomes distribution, using a decomposition of the standard
Summary
Due to the increasing water conflicts among sectors induced by climate change, the crop response to water pressure is one of the main concerns of climate change adaptation policy [1,2]. The agricultural sector is the largest user of total available water accounting for over 70% of the total water available at the global level and even more in the Mediterranean region ([3]) This is mainly used for irrigation, so changes in water rights play an important role in the sustainability of worldwide ecosystems [4]. The modernization of irrigation systems plays an important role in targeting water efficiency This limitation in water resources management includes Spain and many other European Union states [6,7], especially as climate change will probably increase water conflicts among sectors, and reducing the water use for irrigation will be essential to provide for the environmental flows and, ecosystems sustainability [8,9]
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