Economic value of virtual water with the approach of maximizing the productivity of irrigation water

Abstract

The increasing use of water and the decrease in average rainfall along with climate change have caused the reduction of water resources in arid and semi-arid regions. In addition, despite the consumption of more than half of these resources in the agricultural sector, a rate between 0 and 15% of the price of the products has always been received from the farmers. Considering the concept of virtual water and the water content of products in the form of green water, blue water and gray water, the present research has calculated the economic value of virtual water of agricultural products with the approach of maximizing water use efficiency. The investigated sample includes eight cities (counties) of Sanmenxia, Jiaozuo, Nanyang, Shangqiu, Puyang, Luohe, Luoyang and Kaifeng and six agricultural products (wheat, barley, potato, rapeseed, tomato and corn). A fuzzy dynamic programming model has been used to evaluate the objective function. The results showed that the maximum and minimum economic value of water content (sum of surface and groundwater) of the products were estimated for Kaifeng and Shangqiu regions equal to 1.16 and 0.86 Yuan/m3, respectively.