Pirates or pioneers? Unplanned irrigation around small reservoirs in Burkina Faso

Charlotte de Fraiture, Gael Ndanga Kouali, Hilmy Sally and Priva Kabre

Agricultural Water Management, 2014, vol. 131, issue C, 212-220

Abstract: Small reservoirs in Burkina Faso are constructed for many purposes such as domestic water uses, livestock watering and irrigated rice production downstream of the dam. Increasingly farmers use individually owned motorized pumps to draw water directly from the reservoir and irrigate vegetables upstream of the dam. This practice, while tolerated, is unauthorized and referred to as ‘irrigation pirate’ in French. Upstream vegetable cultivation is successful because it is more profitable than downstream rice cultivation. Often, the ‘unofficial’ irrigated area around the reservoir is much larger than the official command area below the dam. However, in the absence of an overarching authority to manage the water source, this may lead to conflicts and resource degradation. We take the example of the Korsimoro reservoir in Burkina Faso to illustrate the positive and negative impacts of spontaneous individual irrigation around communally managed water bodies.

Keywords: Individual irrigation; Small private irrigation; Common resource management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377413001820
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:131:y:2014:i:c:p:212-220

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2013.07.001

Access Statistics for this article

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

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().