Economic and Policy Analysis for Natural Resource Management under Rainfed Agriculture

Not AvailableDeveloping countries are faced with many crises like hunger, employment and growth. To tackle the food and poverty crises these countries will require a new emphasis on small-scale water management in rainfed agriculture involving the redirection of water policy and large new investments. It is widely known that rainfed systems dominate world food production. However, water investments in rainfed agriculture have been neglected over the past few decades. It has been very well established that rainfed agriculture promises large social, economic, and environmental paybacks, particularly in poverty reduction, growth and economic development. It may be reiterated that rainfed agriculture covers most of the world’s cropland (80%) and produces most of the world’s cereal grains (more than 60%), generates livelihoods in rural areas and produces food for cities. Specifically countries in the sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia will be facing an estimated hidden annual food gap of almost 400 million tons by the year 2020. According to a global IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute) study report, this is the food required above the total sum of projected domestic production and imports, to meet the energy needs of the population. Hunger and poverty are thus predicted to remain a major problem especially in these two regions, both subject to ”Undernutrition climatology". In these regions, a large proportion of the arable land is located in water scarce areas that are subject to recurrent dry spells. Water stress caused by such short and recurrent periods of drought during crop growth is a major cause of yield reduction. In the past, misleading "blue water" analyses (focusing only on perennial river flow and accessible ground water) and drought assessments (focusing only on annual cumulative rainfall) have been used as arguments to rule out semi-arid tropical savannah agro ecosystems as potential breadbaskets. There are several problems with such conventional analyses. The majority of the land users in these areas depend on rainfall for their livelihoods (i.e. green water), not on irrigation based on blue water. In drought prone drylands there are problems both due to rainfall deficiencies (primarily due to poor temporal distribution of rainfall and high evaporation losses), soil problems as well as plant problems, the latter originating from dry spell damages and nutrient deficiency. Investments in rainfed agriculture have large payoffs in yield improvements and poverty alleviation through income generation and environmental sustainability. It is in this backdrop that economics of natural resource management with special emphasis on modeling, institutional analysis and other related aspects are studied. Natural resource economics deals with the supply, demand, and allocation of the Earth's natural 322 resources. This sub field of economics is therefore interested in the primary sector of the economy, which engages in resource extraction (that is, the extraction of raw materials). One main objective of natural resource economics is to better understand the role of natural resources in the economy in order to develop more sustainable methods of managing those resources to ensure their availability to future generations. An important dimension of ecological economics, a synonym for natural resource economics is the development of logical linkages between biophysical and economic models. Using biophysical data generated from industry standard models to determine the parameters of an experiment adds a level of external validity. This in turn promotes adoption by key stakeholders of the research findings.Not Availabl