With 16 percent of the world’s population, India has 2.45 percent of the world’s land resources and 4 percent of its water resources. It is obvious that supply will barely match future demand. Around 50 percent of irrigated agriculture and 85 percent of rural drinking water comes from groundwater. Sustainable management of groundwater plays a major role in the agriculture sector, contributing to the economic development of a mainly agrarian country. Half of farmer households in India are indebted and the average outstanding loan increases with the size of the landholding.

Information on water use is required for political, economic and academic decision making on issues affecting everyone?s life. Owing to fi nancial constraints, it is diffi cult to have complete and comprehensive information on everything related to water. Techniques and methodologies are, therefore, used to affordably maximize control. To improve understanding of the different techniques and methodologies used to generate information, the AQUASTAT team sent thematic questionnaires to approximately 170 countries in April 2009.

The central message which emerges from this meeting was that modernization is above all an issue of human-ware. It is quite noteworthy to see that, although most participants to the meeting were engineers, almost every paper and almost all questions and points of discussion dealt with institutional, development and sociological issues and were not focussed on techniques. The issue of human-ware can be further expanded into complementary directions.

This publication explores various aspects of the interface between water rights and land tenure. It is intended to synthetize and assess current learning on this topic, to define salient issues and to propose fruitful approaches for further investigation.

Нашивки Организации Объединенных Наций предназначены для информирования и обучения детей и молодежи, а также призваны убедить их изменить свое поведение и стать активными инициаторами перемен в обществе. Серия нашивок может быть использована в работе со школьниками и молодежными группами, а также с группами гайдов (ВАГГГС) и скаутов (ВОСД). Задания для получения нашивок могут быть легко адаптированы учителями или лидерами.

Meeting Name: European Commission on Agriculture
Meeting symbol/code: ECA/32/02/2
Session: Sess. 32

The AgWater Solutions Project aimed at designing agricultural water management (AWM) strategies for smallholder farmers in sub Saharan Africa and in India. The project was managed by the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and operated jointly with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the Stockholm Environmental Institute (SEI) and International Development Enterprise (IDE).

A potent argument for bioenergy development lies in the ability of the sector to unlock agricultural potential by bringing in much needed investments to raise agricultural productivity to spur food security and poverty reduction. This document presents the BEFS Analytical Framework (AF) developed to test this argument. Agriculture lies at the heart of the BEFS AF and allows governments to consider viable pro-poor strategies for bioenergy development.

L’eau nécessaire pour produire notre nourriture quotidienne représente mille fois le volume d’eau que nous buvons chaque jour et cent fois celui nécessaire pour satisfaire les besoins domestiques des ménages. L’agriculture pluviale ne peut assurer seule l’approvisionnement en nourriture de la population du monde, et plus de 70 pour cent de l’eau que nous prélevons des rivières et des nappes aquifères sont destinés à l’agriculture irriguée. L’agriculture est la principale source de nourriture et de loin le premier secteur consommateur d’eau dans le monde.

Agriculture is coming under more and more pressure to justify its use of the world's freshwater resources and to improve its productive and environmental performance. The allocations of raw water to agriculture (and the allocations within the agriculture sector) all need to be negotiated in a transparent way. This report reviews the large set of literature on the subject and makes the case for the adoption of a functional approach to water valuation as a basis for such negotiation.

The purpose of this paper is examine the notion of tenure in connection with water resources and to explore whether the concept of water tenure has the potential to make a useful contribution towards resolving the world’s water resources challenges. It seeks to provide answers to the following questions: (a) What is water tenure? (b) Does water tenure really exist or is water simply too different from other natural resources? (c) Could the concept of water tenure be useful in terms of the development of natural resources policies and practices?