THE IRRIGATION PLAN OF CATALONIA Authors Joan Anglès Sedó Departament d’Agricultura, Ramaderia, Pesca, Alimentació i Medi Natural de la Generalitat de Catalunya Keywords: water consumption, food production, new irrigated land, irrigation modernization, irrigation efficiency. Abstract Catalonia is a small, predominantly forested country, with a high population density, hence the used agricultural surface (UAS) per inhabitant is small. Considering the importance of intensive farming, the production of unprocessed agro-alimentary products is much lower than the consumption thereof, with a coverage rate of the balance of trade below 45% by way of annual mean.Given the constraints on rainwater availability during the summer months and its interannual variability, typical of the Mediterranean climate and which affects a large part of farmed area in Catalonia, the variety of possible crops and expected yields are very limited in non-irrigated lands. For this reason, farmers have traditionally built infrastructures for water distribution, based on irrigation ditches in the ground, built in flat areas near rivers and which are topographically suitable for irrigation. These traditional systems are under-efficient in terms of the transport, distribution and application of water to crops, and better results could be obtained if these infrastructureswere modernised. Irrigation has traditionally been the main driving force of rural development in Catalonia. Many economic activities have been implemented around the irrigated zones, helping to maintain the rural population. On the contrary, there has been a constant decrease and aging of the population in dryfarming areas. For all these reasons, the Department of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries, Food and the Environment of the Government of Catalonia (DAAM) regards irrigation policy as a high-priority matter, pursuing the following main objectives:— improve the degree of self-supply of food products— increase efficiency in the use of irrigation water— curb rural depopulation and consequently prevent the degradation of the rural environment.To this end, the Irrigation Plan of Catalonia has been drafted. This project provides for the modernization of 175,000 ha of traditional irrigated land and the implantation of 115,000 ha of new high-performance irrigated land in the 2008-2020 period.Keywords: water consumption, food production, new irrigated land, irrigation modernization, irrigation efficiency. Downloads Download data is not yet available. Author Biography Joan Anglès Sedó, Departament d’Agricultura, Ramaderia, Pesca, Alimentació i Medi Natural de la Generalitat de Catalunya Downloads PDF (Català) Issue No. 34: juny 2013 Section Articles License The intellectual property of articles belongs to the respective authors. On submitting articles for publication to the journal QUADERNS AGRARIS, authors accept the following terms: Authors assign to ICEA (a subsidiary of Institut d’Estudis Catalans) the rights of reproduction, communication to the public and distribution of the articles submitted for publication to QUADERNS AGRARIS.Authors answer to ICEA for the authorship and originality of submitted articles.Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for the reproduction of all graphic material included in articles.ICEA declines all liability for the possible infringement of intellectual property rights by authors.The contents published in the journal, unless otherwise stated in the text or in the graphic material, are subject to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (by-nc-nd) 3.0 Spain licence, the complete text of which may be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/deed.en. Consequently, the general public is authorised to reproduce, distribute and communicate the work, provided that its authorship and the body publishing it are acknowledged, and that no commercial use and no derivative works are made of it.The journal QUADERNS AGRARIS is not responsible for the ideas and opinions expressed by the authors of the published articles.
