Curbing water use in agriculture, which is the most water-intensive sector, is necessary and the failure to do so will have catastrophic consequences, a leading climatologist and a university professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology said.
“The annual volume of water consumption in Iran has reached 100 billion cubic meters, of which 90 bcm are used for conventional farming practices and it should be cut by half so that the country can meet agricultural needs sustainably in the long run,” Nasser Karami also told Mehr News Agency.
Crop pattern or the list of crops produced in an area and their sequence have been among the major challenges facing Iran’s agriculture sector in the past many years.
“Modifying outdated cropping patterns can reduce water use to reasonable levels throughout the country and help maintain the current levels of production,” he said.
“New cropping or cultivation patterns should be designed based on the principle that the agro sector will be allocated not more than 40 bcm of water per year.”
Cropping pattern indicates the time and spatial arrangement or sequence of crops and/or fallow in a particular land area. This implies that any change in cropping pattern would include not only a change in the proportion of land under different crops but also a change in time and space sequence of the crops.
Karami said the development and implementation of different crop patterns aim to attain high land productivity for different purposes.
According to the climatologist, Iran covers diverse agro-ecological zones appropriate for a wide range of cropping patterns with different crops, including staple, oilseed, legume, vegetable and animal feed. It is, therefore, important to assess and map these agro-ecological zones efficiently for different crop patterns.
Vertical Farming
According to Karami, another factor that must be taken into account in the new pattern is vertical farming, an urban agriculture practice of growing crops inside buildings.
“Using horizontal spaces in farming is becoming increasingly unsustainable and inefficient. as they gobble up massive volumes of water, that’s why the key sector is begging for a radical redesign to move to greater productivity,” he added.
Self-sufficiency in certain crops has been achieved at a high cost, as it has led to the depletion of renewable water resources.
Renewable resources, the average manual flow of rivers and recharge of aquifers generated from precipitation, were around 140 bcm in 1999 but has been rapidly declining ever since. It fell to 135 bcm, 130 bcm and 105 bcm in 2007, 2013 and 2017 respectively.
Annual renewable water resources average 114 bcm, of which close to 70 bcm are exploitable.
Iran's annual water consumption is over 100 billion cubic meters. The shocking water deficit will not shrink, unless the excessive withdrawal of water from aquifers in the agriculture sector ends. Illegal water wells, which have been dug in the tens of thousands in recent years across the country, must be sealed without fear or favor.
"Projects have been carried out where experts were required to define new cropping patterns for different areas, but they failed,” Hamed Rafiei, a faculty member at Tehran University’s Agricultural Economy Department, said.
Incompatible Studies
Studies have been conducted jointly by universities and the Agriculture Ministry in the past. Yet, more often than not, they were incompatible with the characteristics of the areas they were developed for. This raises the risk of developing a defective cultivation pattern, which will be way more catastrophic than what is being practiced now.
The main reason, according to Rafiei, is that farmers were and are not invited to decision-making meetings.
"Cropping patterns in Iran are designed in high-rise offices but, let’s face it, who knows the land better than the farmer who has spent a lifetime working on a farm in a particular region. In fact, farmers have to implement these patterns so we need to include them in the process from the very first stage. We need to take our cropping pattern proposals and put them up for discussion in the presence of experts," he said.
In addition, the faculty member noted that the government should provide farmers with incentives if cropping patterns are to be implemented successfully.
"We mustn’t force the patterns on farmers, but encourage and support them by lowering their costs, giving them loans, providing them with the required equipment and machinery for new cultivations and putting in place guaranteed purchase plans so that farmers are assured of a market for their products,” he said.
