Adoption of Surface Pipe and Underground Pipe for Water Saving in North China - Impacts and Determinants

Irrigation plays an important role in agricultural practices, and agricultural irrigation systems are the largest consumer of water in the word. Numerous studies on irrigation water management for rice throughout Asia have indicated that much water is being lost due to inefficient water allocation and distribution in irrigation systems. Water-saving irrigation techniques aim to cut the total amount of water by optimizing agricultural irrigation system. Analysis in this paper is based on data entry as four weeks fieldwork from 20th December 2007 to 20th January 2008, which designed to address irrigation practices and agricultural water management. The results showed that, surface level plastic irrigation pipe instead of field channels in case of surface irrigation systems is efficient to reduce evaporation and invalid leakage and can save water, land and energy. So, there is a great potential to extend this technology, PVC pipes can be suitably used in underground pipeline system as they are relatively cheap and being underground and allow pumping of water to a higher elevation, these techniques can save water (up to 30%) in addition to a small amount of land area, compared to unlined canal systems, surface pipeline and underground pipeline technologies have taken a different adoption path during the past years, in the early years of the Peoples Republic, the two of water saving technology adoption rates were all low initially, between 1995 and 2004 village-level adoption of surface pipe more than doubled, from 23% to 80%.