Ruf Thierry, Valcony M.J. (2007). Les contradictions de la gestion intégrée des ressources en eau dans l'agriculture irriguée méditerranéenne. Cahiers Agriculture, 16 (4), p. 294-300. ISSN 1166-7699.
Titre du document
Les contradictions de la gestion intégrée des ressources en eau dans l'agriculture irriguée méditerranéenne
Cahiers Agriculture, 2007,
16 (4), p. 294-300 ISSN 1166-7699
The water resources integrated management model is based on principles set in Dublin in 1992 and reproduced under equivalent terms in most Water Conferences through the last 15 years. This paper introduces several of these principles and discusses them against specific irrigation situations in northern and southern Mediterranean countries. The first principle gives the definition of the hydrologic territory, the watershed, whose limits are never really clear in the Mediterranean context. The second principle considers the unity of the resource and its concerted management between users, planners, and deciders. It is a technocratic approach to observing composite human societies in Mediterranean territories compiling a variety of water concerns according to such concepts as origin, access, use, and reuse. The third principle focuses on the social issues on women, the part of society responsible for assuring the basic foundations of life. Still, in reality this approach hides the strong disparities which have developed in rural Mediterranean societies and which have produced very limited results as far as improved water management by women is concerned. The fourth principle, for which Dublin is the main reference, is the fixing of an economic value for water. There are four modes commonly used for sharing this resource: instituting the payment of tolls, classifying the resource as common property, administering the resource as a public good, and treating the resource as a good on the market. in actual fact, these four modes co-exist in the same areas of water management, especially in Mediterranean agriculture. Each area has developed an institutional economic compromise, but world water policies lead to the hydraulic impoverishment of the weakest producers in irrigated lands and to a new system for distributing resources in which the State, rather than disengaging from management of the resource, is expropriating the traditional holders of water rights and transferring them to the very people who already over-consume the resource.
Plan de classement
Hydrologie [062]
;
Economie et sociologie rurale [098]
