Entangled logics of water and land productivity [Conversations among Egyptian farmers and WaPOR’s remote sensing data]

Agriculture is the most water demanding practice across the globe. With the issues of scarcity and food insecurity becoming a global concern, Egyptian and international governments are investing in projects to increase water and land productivity. With this global attention on raising agricultural productivity, it is crucial to consider that productivity as a concept is ambiguous. The interpretations of productivity are contested, highly relative and situational. Yet the ambiguity gives way to the illusion that the most popular/powerful definition is the only true one. The implication of a concept being logically identified in a certain way and politically supported and implemented in countries worldwide as a universal rule is of dire nature. Some authors claim that the expert-driven logic of resource efficiency and productivity usually interferes with the local communities' resource management practices. The logic’s influence shows in the harming of livelihoods and the disruption of situated production strategies (Boelens & Vos, 2012). In FAO’s database WaPOR, water productivity is defined as the amount of biomass production in relation to actual evapotranspiration. In contrast, land productivity is the amount of yield with regard to the area of land. This thesis invites this definition into a conversation with other productivity narratives enacted by 18 Egyptian farmers in the West Nile Delta. This exploratory research draws upon ethnography principles, participant observation and understanding of embedded practices that make up logics. It does so by focusing on three primary practices that contribute to agricultural productivity: land use, crop choice, and water use. The findings show that the farmers logic displayed intimacy with the land, perseverance to access water, belief of resource abundance, diversity of crops, event-based time and valuing of land in enacting agricultural productivity. While the WaPOR logic was enacted through practices about generalisation of data within the pixels, linear flow of knowledge from WaPOR to the farmers, resource scarcity, homogeneity of lands under assessment, calculatedness of water use and productivity, interval-based time and viewing of land from a distance. At the same time, what was similar in both logics were practices of learning through tinkering, comparing to a threshold, visual observation and subjectivity. By initiating a conversation between two logics, this thesis aims to be an example for further water studies that would like to invite different concepts upholding their “truth” to co-create a diversity of understandings, practices, and water realities