Water management practice in upper Chao Phraya Delta, Thailand: Analysis of water use in the Borommathad Irrigation Project
2001
Fujiki, T. (Tsukuba Univ., Ibaraki (Japan). Inst. of Agricultural and Forest Engineering) | Satoh, M. | Sopaphun, P. | Vudhivanich, V.
This paper focuses on clarifying the present water management practice at the on-farm level in the upper Chao Phraya Delta based on detailed field surveys, and discusses the problems of water management including the development of farmers' water management organizations. The Thai government has implemented a target area policy to give farmers equal opportunities to access water during the dry season and created systematic water management plans including farmers' participation in water management. The target area policy is not fully successful because of the difficulty in controlling farmers' intakes. According to the field surveys, upstream farmers have an advantage of taking water from both lateral irrigation canals and irrigation ditches. In the upstream area of the lateral canal, rice planting was finished in about 40 days, the shortest duration of the survey areas. Downstream of the irrigation ditch, due to insufficient water, farmers reuse drainage water by either pumping up from a lateral drainage canal or by checking a field drain. This reveals that the thorough reuse of drainage water contributes to increasing the area of the dry-season rice cropping. Variations in both the timing and the water sources for rice planting make the farmers difficult to cooperate within the beneficiary area of an irrigation ditch, thus the farmers' water management organizations are not functioning effectively.
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