Title: Water and Agriculture:Facing Water Scarcity and Environmental Challenges
Abstract: Agricultural water use is the main one among all water uses. Despite this use plays an essential role in food and fiber world supplies, provides for mitigating poverty in many regions, and produces a main source of income in many countries, irrigation water use faces severe competition from non-agricultural users and is challenged by opinion makers and decision makers relative to environmental impacts and the so-called less efficient water use. These conditions create important challenges to farmers, managers, engineers and researchers to develop and adopt practices and techniques that favour the sustainable use of water in agriculture. In addition, the every growing water scarcity exacerbates the competition by non-agricultural users and the environmental consequences of irrigation. Overall, these conditions create a challenge to agricultural engineers since water use problems imply not only water management and engineering but also soil and land resource conservation, appropriate equipment engineering, improving working and health conditions, higher water and land productivity, as well as an improved adoption of models and information systems. Facing water scarcity environmental challenges implies, on the one hand, a better knowledge of processes, from the causes to the mitigation issues; on the other hand, it requires that innovation be the object of a chain of interventions, from the creation to the assessment of impacts, from the researchers to the practitioners. Moreover, it is required that progresses in agricultural water use are related to the local people and the landscape where to be applied.
Publication Year: 2005
Publication Date: 2005-02-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 30
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