HR: 14:25h
AN: H23L-04    [Abstracts]
TI: Breaking the Logic of Groundwater-Led Agrarian Change in India
AU: * Siegfried, T
EM: ts2392@columbia.edu
AF: Columbia University in the City of New York, 500 W. 120th St. Room 842A New York, NY 10027, New York, NY 10027, United States
AB: It is well known that the past groundwater led agrarian change in India is not sustainable and the major productivity growth in the agricultural sector over the last 50 years threatened. The groundwater economy in South Asia is characterized by the multitude (20 million in India alone) of individual private well owners who make independent extraction choices in an imperfect market environment. As a result and all over the subcontinent, dramatic regional aquifer depletion (100 to 150 m drops of groundwater levels in some regions) and soil salinization (20'000 to 30'000 ha lost to water logging and soil salinization annually) is observed. Considering that agriculture accounts for approximately 25% of India's GDP and employs nearly 62% of the population these observations are all the more worrisome. Consequently, India might turn from a major crop exporter (35 cubic km / a of freshwater equivalent presently or 50% of the annual average runoff of the Nile river) to a large volume staple food importer in the future so as to be able to feed its estimated population of 1.5 billion (2 billion) people by 2030 (2050). Apart from constantly worsening local employment opportunities, this development will most likely have repercussions on global food markets by causing substantial food commodity price increases on a world‐wide level. In order for policies to effectively address the problems related to groundwater irrigated agriculture in India, the micro foundations of the above mentioned macro level outcomes have to be properly understood. This is far from simple, given the complex fragmentation of the social, political and economic spaces in India and their intricate interplay. Examples of the latter are the targeted public food distribution systems. It will be argued that the outcomes to freshwater allocation, i.e. the absence or presence of certain institutional forms, are critically shaped by the place-dependent dialectic between nature and society. Thus, a prerequisite for the investigation of the trajectories of agrarian change is to properly account for social and natural system dynamics. For this purpose, an integrated, hierarchical computational modeling framework will be presented. More precisely, the agent-based allocation, production and trade model allows studying incomplete markets with few participants and limited information environments. It will help to identify mixed allocation baskets at different spatial scales. These baskets may consist to a variable degree of the allocation of renewable runoff, the development of renewable and non-renewable storage (e.g. rainwater harvesting, artificial groundwater recharge, surface reservoir, and fossil groundwater), investment in alternative sources (desalinization, wastewater reuse, inter-basin water transfer, etc.) and int. commodity trade so as to increase system resilience of economic activity. With such model, local and regional policy interventions (such as cap and trade, differential pricing, etc.) can be tested and consequently ranked based on benchmarks of observable outcomes. These benchmarks include sustainability, Pareto optimality, equitability and the exposure to production risk. Case studies from the Gangetic Plain in Northern India will be presented.
UR: http://freshwateranddevelopment.blogspot.com/
DE: 1816 Estimation and forecasting
DE: 1880 Water management (6334)
DE: 1884 Water supply
DE: 6309 Decision making under uncertainty
DE: 6334 Regional planning (1880)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting