Foreword
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This training program is an update of the audiovisual presentation published by the Economic Development Institute (now known as the World Bank Institute) and the Agriculture and Rural Development Department of the World Bank in 1988. The program has been widely used internationally to present new alternatives for the design of new schemes or the modernization of existing schemes and has had a significant impact on the irrigation modernization programmes of countries such as Mexico or Turkey. In order to respond to a continuing demand for the program materials, the FAO Land and Water Division and Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific took the initiative in 2001 to update the program and convert it to new formats that take advantage of developments in information technology to make the program easy to procure and use individually or in lectures and to disseminate to the widest possible audience. The World Bank kindly agreed to make the original program available for FAO to further develop, update and disseminate. In the fifteen years since the first edition of the program, national and international efforts in the irrigation sector have been geared chiefly toward a reform of national policies and management institutions with a view to increase the participation of the water users in the operation and maintenance of the schemes but also to increase their operational and financial responsibilities, through participatory irrigation management and irrigation management transfer. The prevailing view in recent years was that, in irrigation management, there are no technical problems, only institutional and financial problems. However, because reforms in many countries have not produced the desired outcomes in terms of system performance or financial and environmental sustainability, interactions between institutional, managerial and physical structures are increasingly debated. There is an emerging understanding that physical and institutional reforms of the irrigation sector should be combined, and that irrigation management transfer is not about transferring operation functions only but also governance to the irrigation users and a combination of the two at different levels. Rehabilitation is not enough in many cases and, whether institutions determine the technology or vice-versa, it is now acknowledged that technical aspects deserve more attention. Physical and design features are also seen to possibly limit the scope of water sector reform and irrigation management transfer through lack of control and reliability to guarantee water allocations, poor performance or interfaces between levels that do not allow service agreements, volumetric charges or other water pricing systems to be established. The recent debates at the International E-mail Conference on Irrigation Management Transfer organized by FAO and the International Network on Participatory Irrigation Management (July-October 2001) are an illustration of this new understanding. In their concluding statement, the conference organizers stated that "IMT does indeed create an important opportunity to adopt needed technical, managerial and financial modernization. Modernization -which is custom-designed to fit local needs and circumstances - must be an essential part of IMT programmes in many places if irrigation systems and irrigated agriculture are to be sustainable. Even though many modernization activities may happen after formal transfer, this should NOT be seen as an indication that somehow modernization is less important or is not an essential part of IMT." It is also recognized that the existing infrastructure may have an impact on the range of institutional options for reform: topics for research on IMT identified at the conference included the relation between infrastructure and institutional options, water scheduling and IMT and volumetric water delivery. It was also noted that "increasingly, the emphasis in the 'design' of irrigation organizations is turning towards the introduction, primarily through contracts, of professional management expertise in combination with new forms of accountability and transparency towards users, and, perhaps, more flexibility in delivery". The performance or condition of many systems is a serious constraint to the desirability of transfer for users or sustainability if the level of agricultural performance cannot generate sufficient revenues for the users to pay their expected contributions to operation and maintenance of the schemes. The sustainability of the new water users' associations also depends on their capacity to provide an adequate water delivery service, control and allocate water, and provide an improved service to enable gains in agricultural productivity. This is essential for the farmers to pay water and for the associations to be financially viable. Water rights and the necessity to satisfy different water uses with the same primary infrastructure will also become a major issue, together with obligations related to disposal and quality of effluents and other environmental requirements. Future requirements of water resource management, water scarcity, environment and agriculture will call for radical changes in management and technology as well as in the quality of water delivery service required by the users. The objective of technology design should be to provide infrastructure that enables provision of an agreed level of service. This includes enabling implementation of particular distribution schedules as required by users for their agricultural operations. This general service orientation called for in the sector will often require a departure from established standard design procedures, a major retraining effort for engineers and managers as well as the provision of water users' associations with competent advisory and consulting services. Some of the issues that need to be addressed in the sphere of design and planning of irrigation systems are: what are the advantages and limitations of various design criteria for canal irrigation systems used in many countries? Can one design systems taking into account human and institutional aspects and what would the repercussion be on the type of technology? How does one produce simple, transparent design and operational procedures? Does the knowledge exist on how to design and implement service-oriented water control and management? What are the tools and processes for decision-making in the level of service, in operational rules, in planning and design of rehabilitation works and how are the users involved? How is the decision on service related to financial decisions - service fees or farmers' contributions to operation, maintenance or physical works? How is it related to plans to upgrade management capacity? FAO has contributed to this new awareness and continues to advocate that it is the combination of physical changes with policy and institutional reforms that yield the best improvements in irrigation management, through international conferences such as the Expert consultation on irrigation system modernization (Bangkok, 1996), the ITIS 5 international workshop on modernization of irrigation systems operation (Aurangabad, 1998, with IWMI and CEMAGREF) or publication such as Water Papers Series 19- Impact on performance of modern water control and management (Rome, 1999) and more recently the FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific publication How design, management and policy affect the performance of irrigation projects- emerging modernization procedures and design standards (Bangkok, 2002). FAO has also launched a new website dedicated to the modernization of irrigation systems ( www.watercontrol.org ) to disseminate irrigation modernization concepts, technical briefs and tools such as the irrigation systems Rapid Appraisal Procedure and provide a platform for exchange of information among irrigation and drainage professionals. The program is one of the first main products that can be consulted on and downloaded free of charge from the website. The program will also be distributed on CDROM and published as a hardcopy publication to satisfy the requirements of and for the convenience of various categories of users. The development of training products and of national and regional irrigation modernization training programs is one of the main areas of concentration of FAO's Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific. For modernization to be successful, people need to know specifically what to do and how to do it. Without excellent experts who are well versed in modern tactics, well intentioned revolutions fail - generally with a tremendous waste of personal effort and financial resources as well as environmental degradation. The devil is in the details of modernization programs - only with appropriate modernization actions will satisfactory and rapid progress be made. Improved training has been identified as an essential and missing ingredient in previous modernization programmes. In the World Bank Technical Paper No. 246 - Modern Water Control in Irrigation (Plusquellec et. al., 1994), it is stated that "The fundamental cause for the slow rate of technology transfer […] is a lack of knowledge of available technologies and a misunderstanding of the nature in irrigation, in particular [...] a lack of sufficient training at all levels, from the university to the field." This lack of training is a key bottleneck to rapid and appropriate modernization of irrigation projects. In many projects there are basic hardware and operational changes that could be made which would immediately improve project performance in terms of efficiency, cost recovery, and/or yields. Unfortunately, these opportunities are rarely recognized. Appropriate training would empower engineers and designers to (i) recognize the potentials for improvement, and to (ii) know what solutions are available. A series of national irrigation modernization training workshops has been organized since 2000 by FAO in the Asia region in Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, with the support of the World Bank. These training workshops have confirmed that existing designs represent a significant constraint to the performance of irrigation systems in the region, that irrigation professionals in irrigation projects, consulting firms, irrigation agencies need considerable re-training and that national training institutions do not provide the necessary curricula. They have also confirmed that training in modern water control led to innovative, cost-effective and pragmatic strategies to upgrade the performance of irrigation systems and the service they provide to farmers. It is therefore hoped that this program (and the national irrigation modernization workshop training materials, which can also be downloaded at www.watercontrol.org) will be of use to a broad audience of planners, designers, managers, professors, lecturers and students, serve as a basis for the fruitful exchange of ideas and experience across borders, and more generally contribute to the rapid dissemination of new knowledge which is needed for the modernization of the irrigation sector. The gracious contribution of the World Bank by transferring the program to FAO is acknowledged with many thanks. A large number of professional and experts from international and national technical centers, field projects, consulting firms, irrigation equipment suppliers have provided documents and ideas for the new materials in this second edition of the program. Their contribution is also acknowledged with gratitude. The author of the program, Hervé Plusquellec, was the World Bank Irrigation Advisor when he developed the first edition of the program. He has now retired from the World Bank but is still professionally very active. He has mobilized his vast and unique international experience and his extensive professional network for the development of this second and greatly expanded edition of the program. The generous efforts he put into this work go far beyond any contractual requirement and are a testimony to his great dedication and commitment to progress in the irrigation sector. FAO is interested in developing partnerships with national irrigation institutions, training centers, universities or programmes to translate and publish the program into other languages. Interested institutions are invited to contact me.
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