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Efficient Water Use for Sustainable Irrigation Industry

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Abstract

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the economic efficiency of irrigated agricultural enterprises using a non-radial data envelopment analysis approach. While a number of studies have used radial measures based on data envelopment analysis to obtain efficiency scores for a given production technology, we calculate non-radial measures to understand the efficiency of using individual inputs employed in the production process. In particular, the measures of economic efficiency are decomposed into water use efficiency and managerial efficiency. This decomposition enables us to obtain an efficiency score for the use of water as an environmentally sensitive input in irrigated crop production systems. Treating water input in this way goes beyond traditional measurement of water use efficiency, as the calculated efficiency scores can be used as indicators of sustainability in terms of water withdrawals for irrigation purposes. The results show that the overall efficiency for the considered irrigated enterprises is quite high. This is in contrast to the findings on the water use efficiency scores, which are fairly low. This indicates that while Australian irrigated farms are comparatively more efficient in overall farm activity management, they are not very efficient in managing water resources. In turn, this threatens the sustainability of this industry. There is a substantial variation of water use efficiency scores across irrigated enterprises and across regions. Analysing these variations can provide important insights for current policy and for future efforts to improve water use efficiency that will lead towards more sustainable irrigation industry.

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Notes

  1. A detailed discussion on radial and non-radial efficiency measures is in the methods and data section.

  2. In case of linear programming problems with more than two variables, each constraint (a linear inequality) needs to be converted into a linear equation. This process is conducted by adding a nonnegative variable, which is called a slack variable to each constraint.

  3. Kruskal-Wallis is a non-parametric test for which any specific form for the distribution of the population is not required. It is used to compare between the medians of two or more samples to determine if the samples have come from different populations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics, 206 Biomedical Building (C81), The University of Sydney, New South Wales, 2006, Australia

    Md A. S. Azad

  2. School of Economics, 217 Biomedical Building (C81), The University of Sydney, New South Wales, 2006, Australia

    Tihomir Ancev

  3. Department of Applied Economics II, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Francesc Hernández-Sancho

Authors
  1. Md A. S. Azad
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  2. Tihomir Ancev
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  3. Francesc Hernández-Sancho
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Correspondence to Md A. S. Azad.

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Azad, M.A.S., Ancev, T. & Hernández-Sancho, F. Efficient Water Use for Sustainable Irrigation Industry. Water Resour Manage 29, 1683–1696 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-014-0904-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11269-014-0904-8

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