PIM and Poverty

Issues and opportunities: Irrigation is an important means by which poor people sustain and improve their livelihoods. Participatory irrigation management can enable the poor to have greater voice in decisions. Conversely if poor people are excluded and their interests neglected, then irrigation development may disrupt livelihoods and increase inequity. The poor may suffer disproportionately from irrigation performance problems such as water shortages in tail-end areas, and so may also stand to benefit more from performance improvements. Experience shows that participatory irrigation management offers important opportunities to empower the poor in good governance and to provide benefits for the poor.

Irrigation impacts on poverty: Irrigation can affect the livelihoods of poor people in many ways. These include not just direct impacts on income, expenditures and nutrition but also other dimensions that poor people themselves perceive as important aspects of poverty including vulnerability to shocks, access to resources, social capital and the status that comes from being informed and included in making decisions. Some of the main ways in which irrigation may affect the poor include:

• Increased employment for agricultural laborers
• Higher agricultural productivity for small-scale cultivators
• Reduced vulnerability to drought and more stable yields
• Multiplier effects in local communities from increased demand for agricultural inputs, processing of outputs and greater demand for other goods and services.
• Lower food prices, including for the many poor rural households who are net purchasers of food
• nvironmental effects, positive or negative, on aquatic habitats, groundwater, and soils, including waterlogging and salinization

Making labor more productive. Examining the linkages between irrigation and the poor highlights the importance of how irrigation can help make poor people more productive, including enhancing the security of their access to the resources they need to be productive. Just as increasing concern with basin management has shown the need to look more closely at water productivity, not just land productivity, "more crop per drop," concern for irrigation as a tool for alleviating poverty points out the importance of "more jobs per drop." Simply increasing yields may deliver gains to landowners which are capitalized into land values, while poor people only benefit if their most importance resource, their labor, becomes more productive. This may come from increases in knowledge and skills (human capital) and better access to opportunties (through social capital of organizations and linkages to opportuntie. .

Targeting. Government assistance to irrigation can do more to help the poor if it is effectively targeted. Untargeted assistance may help large landowners and urban consumers while providing fewer benefits for the poor. Self-targeting mechanisms often use labor-intensive technologies and relatively low wage rates to make assistance available to those most in need while reducing the incentives and risk that benefits are captured by others. Geographic targeting to apparently poor and more disadvantaged locations may be appropriate in some cases, but usually much larger numbers of poor people live in areas that on average appear wealthier, so other targeting mechanisms may be more effective. Asking the poor themselves about their priorities is an important starting point in identifying how participatory irrigation management can best help the poor. Community meetings, walkthroughs, participatory rural appraisal and other activities should pay special attention to ensuring that the poor, both women and men, are included and able to voice their concerns.

PIM and poverty. PIM is often introduced as part of policies intended to reduce government subsidies to irrigation and increase beneficiary contributions to the costs of irrigation. This raises questions about the profitability of irrigated agriculture and the distribution of financial responsibilities. The poor would only gain if improvements in irrigation performance and agricultural productivity are sufficient to offset any increased costs they must bear. Gate guards, laborers and others irrigation field workers may lose employment (or try block reform), so attention should be paid to reducing and mitigating labor impacts, particularly for poor workers. Greater reliance on local management may facilitate use of more labor intensive methods for operation, maintenance and construction, benefiting rural laborers. Further study and experimentation is needed to explore ways in which PIM can best help poor people.

Sources for additional information:

1. For a recent review of linkages between irrigation and poverty see IPTRID Discussion Paper No. 1 on Poverty Reduction and Irrigated Agriculture.
2. Barbara van Koppen's book, More Jobs Per Drop: Targeting Irrigation at Poor Women and Men, assesses empirical experience and emphasizes the importance of methods for targeting assistance directly to poor people. A summary and ordering information are available online.