Alternate wetting and drying in Bangladesh: Water‐saving farming practice and the socioeconomic barriers to its adoption

Abstract

Water saving in irrigated agriculture is a critical issue for global food security, and much research has suggested substantial benefits of management systems designed to achieve it. Yet there are likely to be socioeconomic barriers which must be understood if these systems are to be adopted. Here, we highlight one example, Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, almost half of the workforce is engaged in agriculture and many people are dependent on rice as their staple food, sometimes consuming it three times per day. Rice production, therefore, is central both to economic well‐being and to food security in Bangladesh. However, this sector also faces a number of troubling problems. These include an electricity supply over‐stressed by irrigation pumps during the dry season, the gradual depletion of groundwater as a result of unsustainable use, the consumption of rice grains with elevated arsenic content, and the significant emission of rice‐based methane into the atmosphere. Interestingly, for more than a decade, evidence has indicated that AWD—an innovative farming practice—holds the promise of mitigating each of these threats to some degree and has been promoted by the Bangladeshi government. However, evidence seems to indicate that it has not been widely adopted in Bangladesh. This paper reviews the existing literature on AWD, related policies in Bangladesh, and the barriers to its uptake among farmers. The complicated relationship between agricultural and socioeconomic systems represents a key barrier to the successful use of AWD among Bangladeshi farmers. Similar barriers to water‐saving strategies are likely to exist in other countries and regions, and overcoming these barriers will be essential for AWD to be adopted. The case of Bangladesh provides important indications of how this might be achieved.

Potential of Alternate Wetting and Drying Irrigation Practices for the Mitigation of GHG Emissions from Rice Fields: Two Cases in Central Luzon (Philippines)

“…Importantly, these findings highlight the relevance of incentives for farmers for the implementation and impact of AWD: as assumed, farmers' direct monetary incentive for AWD implementation substantially contributed to the success of the dissemination and the high GHG mitigation achieved. The lack of incentives has been identified by many authors as a main barrier to the adoption of water management technologies [27,[40][41][42]. Li & Barker [43] reported an adoption rate for AWD of about 40% in China's rice production sites, where volumetric water prices and water consumption associations were identified as drivers for a high adoption rate.…”

Dimensioning of Wide-Area Alternate Wetting and Drying (AWD) System for IoT-Based Automation

“…Due to intermittent flooding in AWD, emission of the greenhouse gas methane (CH 4 ) is reduced by 73% in the dry season and by 21% in the wet season [10], compared to the continuous flooding method. This also decreases arsenic concentration in the shoots of rice plants [11].…”

Disentangling Challenges to Scaling Alternate Wetting and Drying Technology for Rice Cultivation: Distilling Lessons From 20 Years of Experience in the Philippines

“…This finding may be due to difficulty excluding unintended users from accessing irrigation systems, even with administrative enforcement of irrigation scheduling. Another reason is that irrigation infrastructure and collective management of the physical and institutional conditions determines the excludability and predictability of water used by farmers (Pearson et al, 2018). In canal-based systems, the reduction in irrigation use by upstream farmers due to AWD adoption has resulted in a more reliable water supply to downstream farmers, which eventually led to improved ability to irrigate their crops (Sibayan et al, 2010;Rejesus et al, 2014Rejesus et al, , 2017Valdivia et al, 2016;Palis et al, 2017).…”