Water Scarcity, Livelihoods and Food Security

Research and Innovation for Development

Larry W. Harrington, Myles J. Fisher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415728461
• eBook ISBN: 9781317916369
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology

This volume reviews the evolution of ten years' learning and discovery about water scarcity, livelihoods, and food security within the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food. It draws on the experiences of over 100 projects conducted in ten river basins in the developing world.

The book describes how the program's design evolved from an emphasis on water scarcity, water productivity, and water access to an emphasis on using water innovations to improve livelihoods and address development challenges in specific river basins. It shows how the research was used to foster change in stakeholder behavior, linking it to improved knowledge, attitudes, and skills, which were fostered by stakeholder participation, innovation, dialogue, and negotiation.

The authors describe development challenges, their drivers and their political context, how to address them through technical, institutional, and policy innovations; and the consequences of change at different scales, time frames on equity, resilience, and ecosystem services. Overall, the work represents a major synthesis and landmark publication for all concerned with water resource management and sustainable development.

1 The Challenge Program on Water and Food: A new paradigm for research in the CGIAR¹

Myles J. Fisher,^a

Amanda Harding^b and Eric Kemp-Benedict^c

^aCentro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical CIAT, Cali, Colombia;

^bCGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food CPWF, Paris, France;

^cStockholm Environment Institute SEI, Bangkok, Thailand;

Corresponding author, [email protected].

The creation of Global Challenge Programs and the Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF)

The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has always been about food security. It started over 40 years ago in 1971 with four Centers focused on breeding better staple food crops. In 2000, when it consisted of 16 Centers, it asked its Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) to address its future for the next decade, what it should be doing and producing; how it should be doing it and with whom. TAC produced A Food Secure World for All: Toward a New Vision and Strategy for the CGIAR² to guide it through the coming decade (Box 1.1), which was approved at International Centers’ Week, 2000.³

The CGIAR Chair commissioned a Change Design and Management Team (CDMT) to make concrete proposals for how TAC’s proposals might be implemented. The CDMT recommended that “[The] CGIAR should formulate and implement a few … Global Challenge Programs (GCPs), which are focused on specific outputs and are based on an inclusive approach to priority setting … They should be funded significantly by additional resources.”

Box1.1 TAC’s vision and strategy

Vision:	A food secure world for all.
Goal:	To reduce poverty, hunger and malnutrition by sustainably increasing the productivity of resources in agriculture, forestry and fisheries.
Mission:	To achieve sustainable food security and reduce poverty in developing countries through scientific research and research-related activities in the fields of agriculture, livestock, forestry, fisheries, policy and natural resources management.

One possible GCP identified by the CDMT was “Improved water management practices for agriculture.” Although this set the stage for the submission of a GCP on water in agriculture, there were already powerful movements towards increasing global recognition of the critical state of water, food production and poverty.

World Water Council activities, 1998–2000

In 1997, the World Water Council created a long-term vision on water, life and the environment in the 21st century (Cosgrove and Rijsberman, 1998), which detailed a comprehensive series of activities leading up to the 2nd World Water Forum and a parallel Ministerial Conference in The Hague in 2000. Amongst the activities, which were “meant to move us from where we are today to where we need to be to meet future water needs and ensure the sustainable use of water,” were consultations to obtain visions of the needs for “water for food (including both rainfed and irrigated agriculture” (Cosgrove and Rijsberman, 1998), emphasis is from the original paper). The 2nd World Water Forum, with 5500 delegates, and the parallel Ministerial Conference, with 600 delegates, including 120 ministers, were major international events. Their recommendations influenced subsequent deliberations in the CGIAR and elsewhere.

The Challenge Program on Water and Food, justification and intent

In early 2002, the CGIAR interim Science Council (iSC, which superseded the TAC), chose the Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) together with two others⁴ to go forward for development as full proposals by mid-year. The full proposal of the CPWF was, “an ambitious research, extension and capacity building program that will significantly increase the productivity of water used for agriculture … in a manner that is environmentally sustainable and socially acceptable.” The intermediate objective was

[T]o maintain the level of global diversions of water to agriculture at the level of the year 2000, while increasing food production, to achieve internationally adopted targets for decreasing malnourishment and rural poverty by the year 2015, particularly in rural and peri-urban areas in river basins with low average incomes and high physical, economic or environmental water scarcity or water stress, with a specific focus on low-income groups within these areas.

The iSC endorsed the CPWF proposal at the end of August 2002 for approval by the Executive Council (ExCo). ExCo endorsed the proposal and recommended its approval by the CGIAR on 22 September 2002. ExCo noted that “The proposal demonstrates clear linkages with global work on water and food, demonstrates wide stakeholder inclusion, national agricultural research systems (NARS) participation is very high, and other partners are well represented.”

After the iSC endorsement, the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) was held in Johannesburg 26 August–4 September 2002. The WSSD produced the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, of which paragraph 40 states,

Agriculture plays a crucial role in addressing the needs of a growing global population and is inextricably linked to poverty eradication, especially in developing countries. Enhancing the role of women at all levels and in all aspects of rural development, agriculture, nutrition and food security is imperative. Sustainable agriculture and rural development are essential to the implementation of an integrated approach to increasing food production and enhancing food security and food safety in an environmentally sustainable way.

Subparagraph 40(d) reads, “Promote programmes to enhance in a sustainable manner the productivity of land and the efficient use of water resources in agriculture, forestry, wetlands, artisanal fisheries and aquaculture, especially through indigenous and local community-based approaches.”

Paragraph 40 provided the policy legitimacy for the research directions and themes of the CPWF: it can be seen from two sides. The global water community needed to address the issue of water management in agriculture within the context of finite water resources under increasing pressure. The agricultural sector needed to identify ways to enhance resource productivity in agriculture, including water productivity. This view supported the establishment of the CPWF as a worldwide program aimed at increasing water productivity in agriculture from the community to whole basin scales.

The focus on water productivity remained foremost in the thinking of the CPWF for several years after its inception. “The most important question in the current debate on water scarcity is not so much whether it is true or not, whether we are going to run out of water or not, whether water scarcity is fact or fiction, but whether this debate will help increase water productivity” (Rijsberman, 2004).

CPWF context within the CGIAR’s new programmatic approach

As intended by the CDMT, the CPWF introduced a new model for research for the CGIAR with the emphasis on collaboration, both between Centers, and between Centers and national agricultural research and extension systems (NARES) and advanced research institutes. When appropriate, the new model used a participatory, integrated natural resource management (INRM) approach to develop and disseminate technology (Sayer and Campbell, 2003). The CPWF emphasized team work in which all participants shared knowledge and which led to technological innovation.

The GCPs did not exist as independent fiduciary entities, so that the CPWF operated under the umbrella of the CGIAR International Water Management Institute (IWMI). This led to administrative anomalies, such as the program coordinator reporting to the Consortium Steering Committee, while IWMI management evaluated the coordinator’s performance. Similarly, the program coordinator had little authority over CPWF management staff, who were employed and evaluated by the different consortium institutions involved.

Incremental funding

The CDMT foresaw that as more GCPs were created, they could together require as much as 50 percent of the CGIAR’s budget. The iSC recognized early on that this was unlikely and, although not stated, would certainly meet fierce resistance from the Centers and those donors aligned to particular Centers. The iSC believed that, “The Centers expect the [Challenge Program] funding to be new and incremental …”⁵ and proposed that the GCPs should seek new funding, which would add to the system’s total budget.

The CPWF secured new funding of nearly US$70 million for 2003–2008 from a broad spectrum of donors, which gave it independence from individual donors. It also managed to compensate partly “for a drastic reduction of a major donor commitment in the programme inception phase,”⁶ US$25 million to only US$5 million when the government of the Netherlands changed in May 2003.

Water and food sub-systems

The aim of the CPWF was to increase water productivity through better management of water for food production. The CPWF identified three levels of system organization. At the lowest level, the plant-field-farm system, there are three sub-systems, agroecosystems, upper catchments, and aquatic ecosystems. The second level is the river basin, where different water users interact, and where the trade-offs between and among water users are important. These determine the interactions between surface water, groundwater, and precipitation as well as the interactions between upstream and downstream users. The third level is the national and global water and food systems. The external environment was considered at all levels, including not only the water sector, but the macroeconomic factors that impact it, as well as policies and institutiona...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• 1 The Challenge Program on Water and Food: A new paradigm for research in the CGIAR
• 2 Water scarcity and abundance, water productivity and their relation to poverty
• 3 Harnessing research for development to tackle wicked problems
• 4 The institutional history of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food
• 5 Innovating in a dynamic technical context
• 6 Research on institutions for agricultural water management under the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food
• 7 Partnerships, platforms and power
• 8 From research outputs to development outcomes—selected stories
• 9 Messages and meaning
• Appendix: Projects financed by the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food
• Index