A project by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) offers a win-win solution for Turkish farmers by helping them save both water and energy while boosting yields through programed drip irrigation.
Launched two years ago at Konya Basin in the Anatolian heartland, Turkey‘s foremost agricultural hub, the project aims to create sustainable agricultural land amid the threat of drought.
Ayşegül Selışık, FAO’s assistant representative in Turkey, told Anadolu Agency (AA) on Monday that the threat of drought lingers amid the lack of precipitation in recent months and the FAO projects that water scarcity will affect 1.8 billion living in certain areas by 2025. “Two-thirds of the world’s population will suffer from water stress,” she pointed out.
Agriculture, naturally, is under the spotlight given that it is the sector that consumes the most water globally. “Small families of farmers, rural poor and other fragile groups will be affected most. In Turkey, we see rising stress in water resources, in line with increased demand for water. It is on a regional level now but can worsen in the future,” she warned.
The FAO runs the Sustainable Land Management and Climate Friendly Agriculture Project at Konya Basin. “It showed us that significant gains can be achieved. Based on two years of data, programed drip irrigation introduced a 25.5% water savings in the cultivation of sugar beet, for instance,” she said, compared to traditional irrigation methods. It also helped farmers cut their electricity costs by 23.2%. Slightly lower figures were recorded for other crops, but the savings are evident both in water use and energy use.
