Abstract
The demand for water is rising rapidly, particularly in agricultural and environmental sectors. This has led to more competition to access limited and scarce water resources. Therefore, choosing an appropriate approach to manage water resources, distribution and allocation, to attain sustainable agriculture is critical for every country worldwide. The most well-known method to preserve or store water and adaptation strategy to climate change is irrigation. This paper wished to understand the impact of irrigation on farmers’ income in Laos, especially from rice, which is the main crop of rural people. The difference in differences (DID) method was employed to estimate the regression results. The DID was estimated by the pooled OLS of the effect on the log of households’ rice farm income and log of households’ total income with household head’s age, education, gender, household size, ethnicity and harvest areas variables pointing out the coefficients of the outcome variables of interest (after treatment) were 0.037 and 0.076 with positive sign but statistically insignificant. The result implies irrigation has no impact on rice products. In other words, irrigation does not increase households’ income. The finding indicates the type of irrigation, the location of the operation headquarters and the management system or governance are crucial factors for explaining the impact of irrigation on the rice products in Laos.
Highlights
The demand for water continues to rise rapidly, in agricultural and environmental sectors, creating more competition to gain access to the limited and scarce water resources
All the outcome variables in the treatment group and the control group are slightly different. They are not statistically significant, with the exception of the number of households using tractor and number of households using fertilizer. This indicates that in general, there is no statistically significant difference in the mean of outcome variables between the treatment and the control group in the baseline survey and that without the intervention of irrigation project, the mean of the outcome variables in both the groups is comparable, which supports the main assumption of the difference in differences (DID) method
This paper wished to understand the impact of irrigation on farmers’ income, especially the income from rice, which is the main crop for the rural people in Laos
Summary
The demand for water continues to rise rapidly, in agricultural and environmental sectors, creating more competition to gain access to the limited and scarce water resources. Choosing an appropriate approach to manage water resources, distribution and allocation, to attain sustainable agriculture is critical for every country worldwide. The most well-known procedure to preserve or store water is irrigation, which is one of the prime factors for agricultural development. Irrigation is the single most important component for sustainable agricultural production as it improves agricultural production and ensure food security, which reduce poverty (Nonvide 2018b). Development of irrigation is vital for a country in which the majority of the population depends on agricultural production.
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