With growing water scarcity and increasing competition across water-using sectors, the need for water savings and more efficient water use has increased in importance in water resources management. Improvement in the physical efficiency of water use is related to water conservation through...

Latin America and the Caribbean are relatively well endowed with water resources. However, population growth and rapid urbanization are putting considerable pressure on water available for irrigation. Local and regional water scarcity problems are exacerbated by severe water quality problems;...

The competition for limited water resources between agriculture and more highly valued domestic and industrial water uses is rapidly increasing and will likely require the transfer of water out of agriculture. This paper reviews and synthesizes the available evidence of the effects of water...

Increasing competition for water across sectors increases the importance of the river basin as the appropriate unit of analysis to address the challenges facing water resources management; and modeling at this scale can provide essential information for policymakers in their resource allocation...

"Public-private partnerships offer potentially important opportunities for pro-poor agricultural research in developing countries. Yet in the international agricultural research community-and with regard to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) itself-we see few...

Recent water sector reforms, increased scarcity and vulnerability of existing water resources, combined with declining public funding available for large-scale infrastructure investment in the sector have led to an increased awareness by the Government of Vietnam for the need to analyze water...

"We examine access to, use of, and participation in decisions on improved water supply in the Volta basin of Ghana, one of the first countries to introduce a community-based approach to rural water supply on a large scale. While 71 percent of the households interviewed have access to improved...

Increasing water scarcity, rising costs of irrigation subsidies, and general economic liberalization are creating strong incentives for comprehensive water reform with establishment of tradable water rights and the development of markets in these rights. Experiences in Chile, Mexico, and...

Sustainable irrigation water management should simultaneously achieve two objectives: sustaining irrigated agriculture for food security and preserving the associated natural environment. A stable relationship should be maintained between these two objectives now and in the future, while...

This paper assesses total factor productivity (TFP) growth in India, examines the sources of productivity growth, including public and private investment, and estimates the rates of return to public investments in agriculture. The results show that significant TFP growth in the Indian crops...