Improving groundwater resource accounting in irrigated areas : a prerequisite for promoting sustainable usea

摘要

Quite widely, the agricultural development sector promotes major (multi-million dollar/euro) investments in irrigation technology in part as a simple panacea to reverse the continuous decline of water tables, widely observed in more drought-prone agricultural areas of the developing world. This false paradigm is all too often accepted, rather than challenged, by practising hydrogeologists working on groundwater resource development and management in these areas.