الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract In Egypt, being an arid country with low erratic rainfall of up to 700mm per annum, water management is of particular importance. Without an efficient management, water will become a constraining factor in the socio-economic development in Egypt. Water resources provide multiple services that are essential to human development, such as water for food production, drinking-water, conservation of natural ecosystems, recreation and hydropower. The growing population of Egypt and related industrial and agricultural activities have increased the demand for water to a level that reaches the limits of the available supply. The main objective of the current study is scrutinizing how to maximize the economic outcomes from irrigation water and enhance the environmental and social performance of irrigation water. The maximization of the economic value of irrigation water will carried out using the linear programming approach. The applied methodology in the current study comprises several steps that can be summarized as follows: determining the study area, collecting required data and information about different water uses, developing scenarios considering the various national constraints to optimize the water allocation in a way to maxirnize the economic water returns, and determining the optimal cropping pattern Finally, the study proposed a cropping pattern which increased the economic value of irrigation water from 0.88 LE/m3 to 0.92 LE/m3 and increased the production of some strategic crops like Wheat, Maize, by 5% and 10% respectively and increased the production of Seasame to 8 thousand tons, Soybeans to 25 thousand tons, and sunflower to 3 thousand tons respectively besides, decreasing the cultivated area of high consumptive water crops like Rice by 10%. |