Saturday 18 July 2009

São Francisco River Basin Water and Poverty Relationship

The São Francisco River Basin of Brazil has been subject to multiple interventions to increase access to water for agricultural purposes. The analysis being conducted includes a comprehensive measurement of water availability and its impact on agricultural activities (and poverty) in the SFRB. It controls for variations in socio-economic and political variables. We use two types of measures of access to water, one traditional and one new, to try to identify the links (broadly defined) between water and poverty in the SFRB. Our analysis is done at município level (using 1990 boundaries, there are approximately 450 municípios that comprise the SFRB). We then take estimates of 2003 rural poverty, the only recent ones available for rural areas in Brazil, and have begun to examine interrelationships. Our results imply that overall explanatory power of water on poverty varies across rainfall regimes and between poverty and extreme poverty.

In particular, the results of this modeling effort seem to provide evidence that in areas with fewer natural constraints to large-scale agriculture production (areas with relatively more precipitation), the availability of water may play a more direct role in rural income generation. In areas with less rainfall, variabilty in precipitation may play a bigger role in determining income. The specific econometric results and the correlation between other factors and poverty rates will be analyzed in detail.

In general, the evidence we have on water access/ag poverty/links (distilled from this regression work and other research activities) suggests that where they do exist, the links between water and poverty may not be very strong, and will likely be ‘partial’ and increasingly ‘indirect.’ They will be partial in the sense that improving access to water may turn out to be a necessary condition for improving rural livelihoods in some areas and for some types of smallholders, but it is unlikely to be a sufficient condition for doing so. The links will be indirect in the sense that improving access to water for medium- and large-scale farming operations may help reduce rural poverty via on-farm employment generation, but this indirect link will vary quite substantially depending on product mix on these farms.

Specific outcomes and conclusions of this research are pending.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.