Communal irrigation: A comparative perspective

Abstract

There are upwards of 1 million irrigation systems in our world, supplying water to grow at least 40% of the food we produce annually on this planet.¹ These irrigation systems vary in climate, degree of development of the nation in which they are found, in complexity of how they extract water from nature, in size, in age, in their social organization, in their cost, and in how sustainable they are. We know much about the role of water in the green plant (Chrispeels and Sadava 1977; Grigg 1996). We know a good deal about how to manage the flow of