Intensive Groundwater Use: Silent Revolution and Potential Source of Social Conflicts

Many papers, including a recent editorial of this journal Stakhiv 2003 , have advocated the need for a paradigm shift toward adaptive, integrated water resources management as a means to attain a rationalization in water use. There is, however, one significant element of water policy that has received less attention by most experts and water decision-makers: intensive groundwater use for irrigation in arid and semiarid regions more significantly in developing countries . This editorial provides an overview of this phenomenon and its main pros and cons, aiming to contribute to the current debate over adaptive integrated water resources management. Assessing the implications might not only shed some new light upon some pervasive world water visions, but also help to avoid or mitigate potential social conflicts. Groundwater development has for a long time provided drinking water to urban and rural populations of developed and developing countries. Currently, groundwater is estimated to provide about 50% of the world’s drinking-water supplies United Nations 2003 p. 78 . Moreover, groundwater is arguably the cheapest and fastest way to achieve the United Nations Millennium Declaration goal of halving the number of people worldwide without affordable drinking water and/or malnourished by 2015 Llamas and Martinez Cortina 2002 . In addition, groundwater abstraction by simplified mechanisms, such as the treadle pump, together with cheap drip irrigation systems, also constitutes a plausible alternative for developing countries to overcome the poverty threshold one dollar/person and day per capita income Polak 2004 . While the human and political relevance of these figures is obvious, it cannot be overlooked that urban and rural domestic supply for human consumption amounts to less than 15% of global water use. Thus, this editorial is concerned solely with irrigation, which is generally acknowledged to be about 70% of the world’s freshwater withdrawal United Nations 2003 . Note that this percentage might increase to about 90% if consumptive uses were considered.