Water allocation practices among smallholder farmers in the South Pare Mountains, Tanzania: The issue of scale

The impact of ambitious water sector reforms, that have been implemented in many countries, has not been uniform, especially in Africa. It has been argued that the disconnect between the formal statutory reality at national level and what is happening on the ground may have widened rather than shrunk. There is, therefore, a renewed interest in local water allocation arrangements and how they function. This study looks at water sharing practices and agreements among smallholder farmers in Makanya catchment (300 km(2)), which is part of Pangani river basin (42,200 km(2)) in northern Tanzania. Existing water sharing agreements have been studied in the Vudee sub-catchment (25 km(2)), which has about 38 irrigation furrows of which 20 have micro-dams. Five micro-dams are located at the downstream side of the sub-catchment. At the outlet of the Makanya catchment, farmers practice spate irrigation, using the residual flows from the highlands to irrigate. Based on interviews with smallholder farmers and supported by hydrological data water sharing agreements were found to exist among irrigators using the same furrow, among furrows using the same river and at sub-catchment scale. Some agreements date back to the 1940s. They mostly specify water sharing on a rotational basis at all three scales. No water sharing agreements were found at catchment scale, such as between the water users in Vudee sub-catchment and Makanya village. The study concludes that, as a result of the increase in demand for a diminishing resource, tradeoffs between upstream and downstream water uses have emerged at an increasingly larger spatial scale. At the catchment scale, downstream water users have changed their practices to accommodate the changes in the flow. Currently these claims for water do not clash as upstream water users use the base flow (which does not reach downstream anymore) and downstream water users utilise the flood flows. The water sharing arrangements at sub-catchment scale are negotiated through the social networks of the smallholder farmers and are therefore build on the social ties between the communities. However, at catchment scale, the social ties appear relatively weak in addition to the hydrological disconnect; these links are possibly too weak to build new water sharing arrangements on. It may therefore be necessary to involve more formal levels of government, such as Pangani Basin Water Office, to facilitate the negotiation process and create awareness on the inter-linkages of various water uses at catchment scale. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.