Development

Better conserve, manage and value agricultural water (rainfall, irrigated) in sensitive rural areas, either socially (poor areas) or physically (mountains, arid areas), in order to maintain or improve goods and services production, including environmental services, and revenues. By 2015, elaborate international agricultural water-related guidelines for national strategies, and elaborate by 2020 10 agricultural water-related national plans aiming to support the small-holders farmers and 20 innovative pilot programs.

About the target

We want to advocate towards political decision-makers, in favor of the agricultural water access of small holders farmers, both in the South and in the North, to hold down their situation deterioration, guarantee their water rights and increase their goods and services production and revenues.

In an context of continuous increase of agricultural prices since 2008, the stake is important because the small holders farmers (including pastoralists and fishermen), is amber the main victim and, it is our conviction, the main solution against the scourge of hunger and malnutrition. The small holders farming is characterized by a high productivity by surface unit thanks to available in low quantity resources optimal management : land and water.

However, the question of agricultural water access and effluents treatment by small holders is too often neglected. The governments and the development aid often favour capital and inputs high intensity agriculture, guessed to be more productive while its environmental impacts and water withdrawal are negative.

The agricultural water access defense in favor of the small-holders farmers and minimum investments to improve water collection, management and distribution farming practices are two indispensable measures to contribute to world alimentation security and facilitate vulnerable population adaptation.

We want also to measure the impacts of producing and paying for environmental services : water conservation and reduction of soil erosion and flooding, "clean" water production for downstream users, system resilience to droughts improvements, carbon capture...

The cost/benefits ratio is very advantageous because those investments are often not very costly.

This needs anyway a determined action to enforce the small-holders farming capacities and a legal and institutional accompaniment.

The support the small-holders farming presents in the end undeniable social and economical benefits because it holds down the drift from the land, create or maintain employment in the rural areas and equilibrate food offer and demand between towns and countries in a context of population increase, climatic global warming and pour water access competition between users.

This advocacy should lead to recommendations shared first between water direct users, then secondly between political decision-makers. the OMD n°1 : eliminate extreme poverty and hunger