Adoption of surface pipe and underground pipe for water saving in North China - Impacts and determinants

The urbanization with increasing water demands and exploitation of groundwater are aggravating in recent years. Dwindling water supply and rapid expansion of irrigated agriculture have important implications for northern China´s agricultural sector. Water scarcity and irrigation costs that increase with water use have motivated farmers and communities to adopt the water saving technologies in agricultural sector. Surface pipe system has being used popularly with relatively individual low fixed costs input and highly movable or divisible. In addition, underground pipe systems tend to be more recently adopted by communities or groups of households rather than household based or traditional water saving technologies. We seek to establish a set of first order facts about the role of this two water saving technology, and to increase awareness of pass trends and current status. So our efforts on this survey and research has focused on the economics and adoption these two types of water savings technologies with three specific objectives: (1) to illustrate progress in adoption rate over the past several decades, (2) to identify the characteristics of technologies that have most popular and farmers´ perspectives of technology traits, (3) to examine the determinants to promote or hold back the technologies adoption and diffusion. We find that, despite the growing use of the two of water-saving technologies in recent years, the extent of adoption is still low and there is still considerable room for the two kinds of technologies to be expanded in future.