The Assessment of Irrigation Efficiency in Buyuk Menderes Basin

Abstract

While extending irrigated areas to augment agricultural production, irrigation efficiency should be increased not only to improve the agricultural production but also to obtain the sustainable use of valuable and limited water resources. Through the use of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), which is a linear programming technique to determine the relative efficiency of a decision-making unit, it is possible to decide whether the use of water in an irrigation district is efficient or not. In this study, an input oriented DEA model is constituted to focus on the efficient use of inputs, and the method is applied to the irrigation districts having similar types of agriculture in the Buyuk Menderes Basin, Turkey. This paper aims to determine the efficient irrigation district(s), in other words where the application of water is the most profitable, considering two inputs; water volume supplied and the total irrigated area, and one output, the total value of agricultural production. The weight restrictions consistent with decision makers’ value judgements are added as constraints into the DEA models to prevent excessive weight flexibility assigned to inputs and outputs. The results have provided the efficiency scores of the irrigation districts and numerically delineated desired features of the irrigation districts for maximum efficiency. The analyses for three study years have inferred the robustness of the results. It is concluded that DEA is a practical tool for detecting local inefficiencies and proposing possible improvements for irrigation districts that could offer the greatest potential for growth.