Bio-economic modelling to assess the impact of water pricing policies at the farm level in the Oum Zessar watershed, southern Tunisia

Modélisation bio-économique des politiques de tarification de l'eau au niveau des exploitations agricoles dans le bassin versant de l'Oum Zessar, sud de la Tunisie

Houcine Jeder (), Mongi Sghaier, Kamel Louhichi and Pytrik Reidsma
Additional contact information
Houcine Jeder: IRA - Institut des Régions Arides
Mongi Sghaier: IRA - Institut des Régions Arides
Pytrik Reidsma: WUR - Wageningen University and Research [Wageningen]

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This paper ex-ante assess the impact of different water pricing options in Tunisia using an adapted and improved version of the Farm System SIMulator model (FSSIM) developed for the European context. For integrated assessment at farm level, the Farm System SIMulator model (FSSIM) was used. FSSIM is a bio-economic model developed for the European context, and was adapted and tested for Tunisian conditions to assess, ex-ante, impacts of water pricing policies at the farm level to the year 2015. The results show that all farm types are strongly dependent on the water pricing policy. Farmers that have private irrigation systems and pay for pumping mainly, are more sensitive to the progressive increase of irrigation water costs compared to farms that obtain water from public irrigation systems, who pay for the amount of water received. A sensitivity analysis showed that increasing the water price with more than 17% is not advisable to local decision makers, because the net income continued to decline, while the water consumption remained stable with further increases. Hence, there is no further gain in terms of water saving. Overall, intensive agricultural systems with private irrigation systems seem more vulnerable and unsustainable and therefore the extension of public irrigation systems and semi-intensive agriculture is recommendable to improve the sustainability of agriculture in this arid zone.

Keywords: Irrigated agriculture Water policy bio-economic model Integrated assessment; Irrigated agriculture; Water policy; bio-economic model; Integrated assessment; Agricultural and Food Policy; International Development; International Relations/Trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-04645966v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in Agricultural Economics Review, 2014, 15 (2), pp.29-49. ⟨10.22004/ag.econ.253681⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-04645966v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Bio-economic modelling to assess the impact of water pricing policies at the farm level in the Oum Zessar watershed, southern Tunisia (2014)
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:hal:journl:hal-04645966

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.253681

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().