Drip irrigation for small farmers: A new initiative to alleviate hunger and poverty

Abstract

Despite the impressive gains in global food production over the last half century, an estimated 790 million people remain hungry. Many of the chronically hungry are poor farm families, who have neither the means to produce the food they need nor sufficient income to purchase it. For them, access to irrigation water, or the means to use the water they have more productively, is a key to increasing their crop production, their incomes, and their household food security. Ironically, a technology typically associated with wealthy farmers, drip irrigation, may hold the key to alleviating a significant share of rural hunger and poverty. A new spectrum of drip systems keyed to different income levels and farm sizes (beginning with a US$5 bucket kit for home gardens) now exists and can form the backbone of a second green revolution, this one aimed specifically at poor farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We describe the experience with affordable drip irrigation to date, including its growing use in India and Nepal, as well as the wide range of geographic areas and conditions where these systems may be useful. We propose a major new international initiative to spread low-cost drip irrigation through private microenterprise, with the aim of reducing the hunger and increasing the incomes of 150 million of the world's poorest rural people over the next 15 years. Our estimates suggest that such an initiative could boost annual net income among the rural poor by some US$3 billion per year and inject two or three times this amount into the poorest parts of the developing world's economies.