Growing more food with less water: how can revitalizing Asia's irrigation help?

Asia accounts for 70% of the world's irrigated area and is home to some of the oldest and largest irrigation schemes. While these irrigation schemes played an important role in ensuring food security for billions of people in the past, their current state of affairs leaves much to be desired. This paper takes forward the IWMI–FAO–ADB (Asian Development Bank) recommendation of a five-pronged approach for revitalizing Asia's irrigation and provides a region-specific road map for doing this. The underlying principle of these multiple strategies is the belief that the public institutions at the heart of irrigation management in Asia need to give up comfortable rigidity and engage with individual users' needs and the demands placed by larger societal changes.