Measurement of Irrigation Water Efficiency and Analysis of Influential Factors:An Empirical Study of Mengcheng County in Anhui Province

In the context of problems of water resources becoming increasingly serious,enhancing water use efficiency is the fundamental requirement for building the water-saving society.Agricultural irrigation water is regarded as the major water user in China.It is therefore of great importance to measure the technical efficiency of irrigation water in order to develop reasonable irrigation water policies and improve the irrigation water efficiency.In this paper,stochastic frontier analysis has been performed to measure the irrigation water efficiency from micro-level farmers on the basis of questionnaire surveys.Given the availability and easy-processing of data,the irrigation water of wheat was taken as the primary research objective.A total amount of 250 questionnaires were sent out to investigate the individual behavior of the farmers in their allocation of irrigation water for the wheat in Mengcheng County of Anhui Province.There were 237 valid questionnaires returned.Anhui is one of the major wheat producers of China,so it is of great practical significance to measure the irrigation water efficiency of local wheat on an individual basis.Yield per hm2 is defined as the output.Seed input,chemical input,machinery input,labor input,and irrigation water input are regarded as the essential input variables in building the C-D production function.As the single element efficiency,irrigation water efficiency has been measured based on the technical efficiency in agricultural production of farmers.Results show that both the technical efficiency in agricultural production and the irrigation water efficiency appear to be far less than effective.There is room for improving the efficiency.Meanwhile,the value of irrigation water efficiency is generally lower than the technical efficiency in agricultural production.Thereby,there is large potential for water-saving.As far as the value distribution is concerned,statistics show that the distribution of technical efficiency of agricultural production is more concentrated than the irrigation water efficiency.The distribution of irrigation water efficiency tends to be more dispersed and fluctuant.The Tobit model was used to analyze influential factors affecting the irrigation water efficiency.Results show that the average irrigation water efficiency is just 0.4821;there is still large potential for water-saving.Enhancement of farming experience,extension of agricultural production scale,strengthening of water-saving awareness,promotion of well irrigation,acceleration of water-saving irrigation technologies,as well as the irrigation water price reform can be greatly conducive to improving the irrigation water efficiency.