Shrinking water resources as a potential result of climate change (CC) creates a challenging tradeoff situation in the north of Tunisia. This study provides valuable insights into the conditions that can promote farmers' acceptance of regulated deficit irrigation and a new water pricing policy to address CC impacts on the semi-arid irrigated region which will allow for a sustainable irrigation regime and the conservation of water resources at regional scale. Binary logistic regression was used to analyze data collected from 100 farmers in the citrus regions of Beni Khalled and Menzel Bouzelfa, to identify determining factors for farmers' willingness to accept the proposed water management strategies. Empirical findings reveal that the significant explanatory variables are essentially linked to farmer satisfaction about the current irrigation management in relation to water supply reliability, rather than the social criteria and farmers' awareness of water scarcity. More efforts are needed to improve the transparency of water allocation systems to motivate the willingness of water users to adopt new technologies or policies. The different stakeholders should agree to take action now about strategic extension and communication plans to enhance awareness on ensuing environmental problems, to take advantage of long-term profitability of the water restriction.
This study aims to analyse Tunisian farmers’ ability to pay (ATP) in a citrus area and propose a penalising price strategy based on the block-pricing process to decrease over-irrigation without affecting farmers’ incomes. The methodology is based on the residual imputation approach to determine farmers’ ATP, a stochastic production frontier to estimate the technical efficiency to determine optimal water irrigation quantity and calculation of the price elasticity of demand for an effective penalty and the Gini index before and after penalisation to study equity improvement. A survey was carried out on a sample of 147 citrus farms in the Nabeul Governorate, Northeastern Tunisia. The technical efficiency analysis confirms that an optimal quantity of 5000 m3/ha guarantees the maximisation of yields and profits. Above this quantity, the amount of overused water could be penalised without significantly affecting farmers’ incomes. Results also reveal that water overconsumption represents 28% of available resources and the ATP varies according to technical efficiency. Therefore, the proposed penalty system could reduce water overconsumption by 44.56% without deteriorating agricultural welfare. To improve water management as well as farmers’ welfare, this study recommends an increase in the technical efficiency level of farms to optimise all production factors for any implemented pricing policy.
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