It seems the Turnbull Government did not want the
world to know, or Australian voters to be reminded, that it had placed long
term water sustainability in four of its eight states and territories in jeopardy.
The Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United
Nations draft report in question was the following:
C.J. Perry and Pasquale
Steduto, (25 May 2017), DOES IMPROVED IRRIGATION TECHNOLOGY SAVE
WATER? A review of the evidence: Discussion paper on irrigation
and sustainable water
resources management in the
Near East and North Africa
Abstract
The
Near East and North Africa (NENA) Region has the lowest per-capita fresh water
resource availability among all Regions of the world. Already naturally exposed
to chronic shortage of water, NENA will face severe intensification of water
scarcity in the coming decades due to several drivers related to demography,
food security policies, overall socio-economic development and climate change.
Irrigated agriculture in the Region, which already consumes more than 85
percent of renewable fresh water resources, will face strong challenges in
meeting augmented national food demand and supporting economic development in
rural areas. Countries of the NENA Region promote efficient and productive
irrigation as well as the protection and sustainable management of scarce and
fragile natural resources, particularly water, in their national plans. Through
the Regional Initiative on Water Scarcity, FAO is providing support and focus
to efforts in confronting the fast-widening gap between availability and demand
for fresh water resources. A key question to address is: how can countries
simultaneously reduce this gap, promote sustainable water resources management
and contribute effectively to food security and enhanced nutrition? The
traditional assumption has been that increasing irrigation efficiency through
the adoption of modern technologies, like drip irrigation, leads to substantial
water savings, releasing the saved water to the environment or to other uses.
The evidence from research and field measurements shows that this is not the
case. The benefit at the local “on-farm” scale may appear dramatic, but when
properly accounted at basin scale, total water consumption by irrigation tends
to increase instead of decreasing. The potential to increase water
productivity— more “crop per drop”—is also quite modest for the most important
crops. These findings suggest that reductions in water consumption by irrigated
agriculture will not come from the technology itself. Rather, measures like
limiting water allocation will be needed to ensure a sustainable level of water
use. The present report provides the evidence needed to open up a discussion
with all major stakeholders dealing with water resources management on the
proper and scientifically sound framework required to address jointly water
scarcity, sustainability and food security problems. A discussion that has been
disregarded for too long.
Government representatives from the Australian Embassy in Rome disagreed
with the research findings for the Australia section summarised in the original
report. FAO, in response, welcomed the opportunity to improve the report.
Dissemination was put on hold and the report was removed from the FAO website
pending inclusion of additional material relevant to the Australian section. In a series of exchanges, no empirical evidence was presented to support
the Australian authorities’ claim that the investment program in the Murray
Darling Basin has generated substantial water savings and environmental
benefits. This left the global principles
and conclusions set out in the original report unchallenged, while the results
from Australia remained contentious. Therefore, it was decided that the best
solution to the matter was to withdraw the Australian section from the
publication and let the Discussion Paper to be available again on the web. The
original and current versions of the report both invite submissions of additional
case studies, information and analysis to WSI@fao.org. Cases documenting technical or policy interventions
where irrigation water has been released to environmental or other uses will be
particularly valuable.
The
suppressed section in the original draft of this UN report would have been
identical or very similar to this version of the text:
4.1 AUSTRALIA
Document(s)
System of Environmental-Economic Accounting for Water (SEEA-Water)
(United Nations Statistics Division, 2012); Water Account Australia 2004–05,
(Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2006); Droughtand the rebound effect: A
Murray–Darling basin example (Loch and Adamson, 2015); Understanding irrigation
water use efficiency at different scales for better policy reform: A case study
of the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia (Qureshi et al., 2011); Water Reform and
Planning in the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia (Grafton, 2017)
…………………………………...........................................................................................
Context
Australia
has led the world in the introduction of water rights in a context of extreme
resource variability.
This in turn
has provided the basis for managed trading between sectors and locations, and
valuable lessons regarding potential problems as previously under-utilized entitlements
are sold and used, and of “stranded assets” if significant volumes of water are
traded out of an area. More recently, evidence suggests that subsidy programmes
to “save” water seem to have been ineffective, poorly conceived and
un-prioritized.
…………………………………...........................................................................................
Highlights
The Murray
Darling Basin (MDB) is widely recognized for its advanced standards in water
resources management—in particular the system of tradable water rights that
allows transfer of water on short term or permanent leases subject to
evaluation of third party impacts by the regulatory authorities.
Australia
participated in the formulation of the United Nations (UN) System of
Environmental-Economic Accounting for Water. This framework accounts for water
withdrawn from “the environment” (rivers, aquifers), use of that water in
various sectors, including transfer between sectors (for example a water utility
supplying a factory or town), consumption through ET, and direct and indirect
return flows to the environment and to sinks. Trial implementation of the
framework was planned in Australia, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics had
already in 2006 issued guidelines referencing the System of Environmental-Economic
Accounting for Water (UN- System of Environmental-Economic Accounting for
Water
(SEEAW) system), which was to be applied to the reporting of the 2004-5
national water accounts.
However, the
following statement from the introduction to Chapter 4 of the 2004-5 National
Water Accounts for Australia5 is apparently at variance with one critical
element of the SEEAW approach—namely the distinction between consumptive and
non-consumptive uses:
This chapter examines the use of water within the AGRICULTURE industry
in Australia. Water used by this industry includes livestock drinking water and
water applied through irrigation to crops and pastures. Since the AGRICULTURE
industry does not use water in-stream, or supply water to other users, total
water use is equal to water consumption.
Elsewhere in
the Accounting Standards it is stated that:
It is believed that leakage to landscape from surface water resources
such as rivers and storages occurs in the MDB region; however, reliable volumes
are not available, and currently there is no suitable quantification approach
to estimate these volumes.
Does this
assumption of zero return flows matter? Indeed it does: Australia is now
embarked on a massive (AUS$ 10bn) programme to save water for the environment,
including subsidies to farmers for hi-tech on farm investment. Savings are
estimated on the basis of typical application efficiencies (e.g. flood irrigation
50 percent, drip 90 percent), so a farmer with a water entitlement of 100 water
units, switching from flood to drip would be assumed to consume 50 units at
present, which would require a delivery of only 50/0.9 (55.5) units after
conversion. The “saving” of 44.5 units are then divided between the farmer and
the environment. Of the 22.25 units going to the farmer, he consumes (with the
new technology) approximately extra 20 units. So on-farm water consumption is
expected to increase from 50 units to 70
units (and return flows are diminished by approximately the same amount), in
apparent direct contradiction to the programme objectives. In some cases, such
return flows will be non-recoverable outflows to saline groundwater; in other
cases, where irrigation is close to rivers or where groundwater is usable, the
return flows are recoverable and cannot be counted as “savings”. However, the
current evaluation of investments includes no apparent basis for assessing whether
subsidized introduction of hi-tech systems will actually release water to
alternative uses, or simply increase consumption by the extra amount allocated
to the farmer. A more comprehensive implementation of UN-SEEAW—where return
flows to the environment are specifically accounted for—would have addressed
this problem.
Other
authors have identified the issue. Qureshi et al. (2011) point to the problem
of ignoring return flows, and the danger of focussing on local “efficiency”,
while Loch and Adamson (2015) go on to identify the “rebound effect” whereby
when water deliveries to the farm are more valuable, the demand for water
actually increases.
Most
recently, writing in a Special Issue of Water Economics and Policy that
addressed many of the complexities of managing water scarcity in the Murray
Darling basin, Grafton (2017) made the following key observations regarding the
Australian experience with providing subsidies for on-farm improvements in
irrigation technology:
* About USD 2.5 billion of taxpayers’ funds used for improving farm irrigation
has primarily benefitted private individuals;
* These investments have had no discernible impact in terms of reduced
water use on a per-hectare basis, or release of water to alternative users;
* The buyback of water rights from willing sellers was the most effective
use of taxpayer funds to release water to alternative uses;
* Investments in irrigation to raise “crop-per-drop” productivity
had failed to deliver water savings on a basin scale.
