1 Assessing Impacts of Irrigation on Poverty :

Conceptual Frame As a vital resource in agriculture, irrigation water contributes to many productive and livelihood activities. With the common belief on the important role of irrigation in agricultural growth, many developing Asian countries have promoted irrigation development over the last five decades to achieve such broad objectives as economic growth, rural and agricultural development, food security, and protection against adverse drought conditions—all expected to contribute to improved social outcomes. Conceptually, the benefits of irrigation are realized through improvements in: agricultural productivity per unit area and overall agricultural production, employment and wages, incomes, consumption, food security and overall socioeconomic welfare. These benefits tend to be interrelated and reinforce the impacts of each other. Through these benefits, irrigation water is linked to poverty alleviation both directly and indirectly. Direct linkages operate via localized and household-level effects, and indirect linkages operate via aggregate or subnationaland nationallevel impacts. Irrigation can benefit the poor through raising yields and production, lowering the risk of crop failure, and generating higher and year-round farm and nonfarm employment. It can enable smallholders to adopt more diversified cropping patterns, and to switch from low-value subsistence production to high-value market-oriented production. The indirect linkages operate via regional, national, and economy-wide growth effects. Irrigation investments act as production and supply shifters, and have a strong positive effect on growth, benefiting populations in the long run. Further, irrigation benefits also accrue to the poor and landless in the long run, although in the short run relative benefits to the landless and land-poor may be small, as the allocation of water often tends to be land-based. In spite of this, the poor and the landless also benefit from irrigation investments through increased food supplies and lower food prices. In sum, irrigation can influence poverty through three pathways: a) micro-pathway—through increasing returns to physical, human, and social capital of the poor households (productivity pathway); b) mesopathway—through integrating the poor into factor-product and knowledge/information markets (market participation pathway); and c) macro-pathway—through improving growth rates and creating second-generation positive externalities (growth pathway). These pathways are very much interlinked. What happens on one particular pathway does have impacts on others. On the other hand, there can be instances where irrigation generates negative outcomes, adversely affecting resources, opportunities and overall social outcomes. Negative impacts can adversely influence poverty through the abovementioned direct and indirect linkages and pathways.