Making Irrigation Work for Farmers

Consortium for Development Policy Research (CDPR) hosted its twelfth Lahore Policy Exchange talk on “Making Irrigation Work for Farmers?”. The irrigation of the Indus River and its four tributaries is the bedrock of Pakistan’s agriculture. But does the current irrigation system allocate water to the full benefit of farmers? Recent research shows that current measures of irrigated water allocation do not adequately capture its efficiency, thus underestimating how much farmers are losing due to inefficient irrigation. This has major implications for Pakistan’s stagnating agricultural productivity.