Water scarcity in West Asia and North Africa (WANA) is a well-known and alarming problem. Today the issue is of increasing concern to national governments and research institutions. Increasing water scarcity is threatening the economic development and the stability of many parts of the region. At present, agriculture accounts for over 75% of the total consumption of water. However, with rapidly growing demand it seems certain that water will increasingly be reallocated away from agriculture to other sectors.  Moreover, opportunities for the significant capture of new water are now limited.  Most river systems suitable for large-scale irrigation have already been developed.  Few major resources of renewable groundwater remain untapped and current resources are subject to overexploitation, with extraction exceeding recharge rate in many cases. 

While gains in efficiency are potentially available from improved distribution and use of water in fully irrigated agriculture, a great proportion of the region's agricultural livelihoods are based on dryland farming systems where production is dependent on low and extremely variable rainfall.  The challenge in rainfed areas is to enhance productivity through improving on-farm water use efficiency and supplementing rainfall either through water harvesting or the strategic use of sources of renewable water to augment essentially rainfed production. However, conventional practices, which have been developed for managing water under normal water supply conditions, are not suitable under conditions of water scarcity. The need for special management of water under conditions of scarcity, based on maximizing the return from each unit of water available for agriculture, now applies to almost all the countries of WANA.

Technologies for improved management of scarce water resources are available. However, many of these technologies are not widely implemented or are not seen as feasible by farmers. This can be attributed to a number of constraints, including technical, socioeconomic and policy factors, but most importantly the lack of community participation in the development and implementation of improved technologies. This project will be based on community participation in research and the development, testing and adaptation of improved water management options at the farm level.  

Benchmark sites has established in the three agro-ecologies (rainfed areas, the badia and irrigated areas) to study these issues. At these benchmark sites, water use will be studied at different levels: household, community, watershed and policy level. This will require a multidisciplinary approach, involving many different research disciplines, to understanding the current situation and to developing and testing water-use efficient technologies under farm conditions.

The research is concentrated in three benchmark sites, one in Morocco for rainfed agriculture with three satellite sites in each of Syria, Tunisia and Algeria; one in Jordan for drier environments (badia) with two satellite sites in each of Saudi Arabia and Libya; and one in Egypt for irrigated environments with two satellite sites in each of Sudan and Iraq.

Organization chart.pdf