Workshop 1 - Water management for sustainable agriculture

Abstract

WATER MANAGEMENT FOR AGRICULTURE IN FRANCE

Socioeconomic sustainability and users' involvement

Messrs. J. PLANTEY, H. TARDIEU, M. MESNY, J.P. NICOL, Th RIEU et J. VERDIER

FRANCE

France, as other Mediterranean countries, has a long history of water development, born from water scarcity, which has been constantly looking for the best agricultural use and fair sharing. A complex institutional structure has progressively been set up to develop private initiatives within a public service framework. During the last century, Authorized Syndicate Associations (ASA) thus developed. They were public establishments constituted by land owners for sharing the building and management of irrigation systems. In the 1950s, the State created, within a more ambitious land use planning, Regional Development Companies (SAR), kind of public corporations with a concession from the State, to develop water resources and manage irrigation schemes in the southern regions of France. Well subsidized by the State at the beginning, the SARs now cover their costs with the contributions of their customers. This management is now financially sustainable as it includes the provisions necessary for maintaining the investments under concession. It nevertheless keeps the basic characteristics of a " French " public service: continuity, equity, sustainability, transparency. Finally, Basin Organizations were set up more recently, with an approach widened to include management and protection of aquatic media, to seek a global consensus on water management by using dialogue and financial incentives, while the State keeps the role of controller and arbiter. Thanks to the complementarities that exist between these different institutional structures, the cooperation which was established between the ASAs of a region and the SAR in particular, solutions that have already been experimented can be proposed to our partners concerned with organizing a sustainable water management and development.

The key to this issue of water management is, in our regions with scarce resources, the method used for demand management, that is the means to set up for efficiently sharing the resource while adequately orienting the customers behaviour. These means, while conceptualized by researchers and managers, involve financial incentive -tariffing- or contractual regulations -the quota system-. With an adapted tariffing that informs the user of the economic value of water while respecting -in irrigated agriculture in particular- the expected income, consumption is oriented while ensuring the financial balance of the managing organization. Examples are given. When demand pressure becomes too strong, a quota system -associated with an adapted tariffing- is set up to ensure a stricter water sharing. To be accepted, this quota system must be founded on a contractual approach of shared management, relying on solidarity between the upstream and downstream parts of the basin. To be transferred, this type of demand management, which is necessarily associated with a sound resource management, implies that real specific and autonomous organizations are set up for water management, whose main requirement is to associate service quality with the public interest.