Abstract
There are many traditional agricultural production systems in Asia that have resulted not only in outstanding landscapes, maintenance of agricultural biodiversity, indigenous knowledge, and resilient ecosystems development but also provided economic, environmental, and social goods and services over thousands of years. With growing population and economic aspirations, many of these systems are being replaced by modern agriculture systems that are designed for efficiency and large-scale development. However, there is also a growing realization that we should in some form preserve these valuable repositories of indigenous knowledge for climate change adaptation, biodiversity conservation and land management, and the rich culture they spawned. Different approaches such as World Cultural and Natural Heritage sites, in particular World Cultural Heritage Landscapes of UNESCO, or the Globally Important Agriculture Heritage Systems of FAO attempt to preserve and showcase representative production sites from these systems. However, they cannot be upscaled to cover the vast populations still engaged in them. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of fusing the traditional and the modern systems through building mosaics of traditional and new systems.
In this article, we have studied the Deduru Oya irrigation project which provides an ideal ground for research and experimentation of integrating modern irrigation and ancient irrigation systems to improve cropping intensity and resilience. The simulation carried out for past 10 years reveal that this project planned to operate LB canal irrigation management incorporating the existing small irrigation tanks will be able to supply the water demand for LB development area for paddy cultivation without failure. While the modern system can adequately meet the irrigation demand, the integration of existing distributed small tanks provides resilience for extreme drought conditions and the much-needed macro-microscale integration with autonomy at microscale.
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Notes
- 1.
The management of the water resources of the Mahaweli Project is entrusted to the Water Management Panel (WMP) which is headed by the director general of MASL and consists of all heads of government agencies concerned with the management and operation of the Mahaweli Project. The director of Water Management Secretariat (WMS) functions as the secretary of both the Policy Planning Panel and the Mahaweli Water Management Panel, and this helps to maintain the necessary communication link between the two panels. The WMP is also responsible for the overall cultivation programs in the areas served by the Mahaweli Project. The WMP is assisted in its works by a technically specialized Water Management Secretariat (WMS) constituted within the MASL. It is responsible for the operational planning and coordination responsibilities of the WMS extend to the other operating agencies as well. The WMS provides information and recommendations to the WMP to assist it in reaching its operational policy decisions. Once the decisions are made, the monitoring of the total program is directed by the WMS.
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Herath, S., Mishra, B., Wong, P., Weerakoon, S.B. (2018). Mosaic of Traditional and Modern Agriculture Systems for Enhancing Resilience. In: Takeuchi, K., Saito, O., Matsuda, H., Mohan, G. (eds) Resilient Asia. Science for Sustainable Societies. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-56597-0_8
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