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Innovative land and water management approaches in Asia: productivity impacts, adoption prospects and poverty outreach

There are no unanimous views regarding the real water‐saving effects of land and water management innovations. Some claim that the innovations merely change the prevailing water allocation. However, there is no dispute regarding their land and water productivity impacts. The water productivity improvement ranged from 30% for zero tillage technology to 648% for micro‐irrigation technology for beetroot. The land productivity improvement ranged from 4% for bed planting technology to 88% for micro‐irrigation technology for watermelon. Aerobic rice varieties are inferior to lowland rice varieties in terms of land productivity but superior in water productivity. In addition, some of the innovations reduce cost of production, improve the quality of produce and entail positive environmental externalities. However, the current level of adoption of these innovations is not satisfactory due to insufficient labour and organic fertilizer availability problems, uncertain irrigation water supply, crop specificity and complexity, lack of capital, high knowledge and technical skill requirements. To realize the potential benefits of these innovations to the poor the following actions are suggested: (1) provision of subsidies; (2) targeted training opportunities; (3) encouragement of private participation in the supply chain of inputs; (4) focus on short pay‐back period technologies; (5) strengthening of public research on the systems. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.