The withdrawal of water for irrigation in the dryer regions of Mexico already accounts for some 91% of potential availability. Further expansion of irrigated acreage, therefore, must rely more on increased water use efficiency rather than increased supply from engineering works. A prime instrument to bring about such an improvement could be an appropriate water pricing structure. The first three sections of the paper present the conceptual issues involved, as well as the empirical findings which show that irrigation farmers pay, on average, less than 10% of actual water costs. Water use efficiencies are shown to be less than 50% but are markedly higher in irrigation districts with volumetric compared to those with fixed water charges. The fourth section develops some representative pricing structures that are designed to account for both efficiency and income distributional goals, while the last one addresses some of the likely implementation problems.

There are factors affecting erosion such as climate, soil type, vegetation and topography. Upland areas are denuding exponentially due to the fact that those people looking for livelihood had little concern and awareness on environmental sustainability and management. Upland farming practices that are easy like weeding, pest control and fertilization were often carried out without soil erosion control and water management. The result of the study revealed that an area with intercropped permanent crops has less amount of soil eroded or tolerable annual soil loss. But the areas with short duration crops (cash crops) and which adopted the same cropping pattern from the previous season resulted to severe soil erosion. Calculated annual soil erosion are 3.33, 4.57, 23.18, 0.31 tons and zero erosion for Site 1, Site 2, Site 3, Site 4, and Site 5, respectively.