Estimating the impacts of water pricing on smallholder irrigators in North West Province, South Africa

Stijn Speelman, Jeroen Buysse, Stefano Farolfi, Aymen Frija, D'Haese, Marijke and D'Haese, Luc

Agricultural Water Management, 2009, vol. 96, issue 11, pages 1560-1566

Abstract: Worldwide growing water scarcity has increased the call for economic instruments to stimulate rational water use in agriculture. Furthermore, cost-recovery is now widely accepted as a cornerstone of sustainable water management. In many developing countries, where agricultural water use is often still subsidised, water pricing policies are developed for allocating water efficiently and achieving sustainability of water systems. However, the impacts of water pricing policies on irrigation water use and on farm production systems is mostly unknown. We introduce an innovative two-stage methodology that allows estimating these effects at farm level. Applying the method to small-scale irrigators in South Africa, we show that water demand is quite responsive even to small changes in water price. In addition, the introduction of a water price significantly decreases farm profit. This appears to be a problem primarily for the poorer farmers.

Keywords: Water; savings; Irrigation; Data; envelopment; analysis; Simulation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6T3X ... 7ba6e0bc2fecf779864c
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:96:y:2009:i:11:p:1560-1566

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Series data maintained by Heidi Boesdal ().