Irrigation practices: peasant-farming settlement schemes and traditional cultures

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Science has been highly successful in soil conditioning, plant breeding, and in pest and disease control, but has not yet turned its full attention to making the best use of water for irrigation. As water becomes scarcer worldwide so the need for more efficient water use becomes a necessity for peasant agriculture. It is to this theme that this paper principally addresses itself. In SE Asia flooded rice irrigation occupies some 70 Mha and is expanding at such a rate that water is becoming increasingly expensive to provide. In these circumstances there is a need to look critically at the methods of irrigating and growing rice. The practice of transplanting seedlings and whether rice could be grown equally as successfully in non-flooded conditions requires investigation. The way ahead is being provided by the economies forced on farmers who pump water from their own boreholes. Although the Dumoga project in north Sulawesi, Indonesia, has not yet reached the point of farm development where water shortage is a problem, that time will come; and the scientific programme that is already underway in the area (under the auspices of the ‘Project Wallace’ expedition) could usefully be expanded to include the technical and sociological problems involved in water allocation. Similar studies would also benefit hill irrigation in Nepal, Peru, the Philippines and similar mountainous areas. Excessive soil saturation and poor water control are frequent causes of catastrophic landslides and soil loss from erosion. In those arid zones with a tradition of irrigation and access to oil revenues, better water control can be achieved by the introduction of combined manual and electronic control systems. In Iraq, for example, these systems will help to make the best use of the restricted waters of the Euphrates basin. Scientific advance in irrigation methods is more difficult to foresee in the arid sub-Saharan areas, where the adoption of techniques already successfully applied elsewhere is likely to be the prime necessity.