Irrigation has always played a central role in the agrarian IntroductionHow much more food would Asia need by 2050? Is there enough land and water to grow this amount of food, without inflicting irreversible damage to the environment? In this quest for more food with less water, what role can Asia's irrigation systems play? What would it take to revitalize Asia's irrigation and how best can it be done? Do different regions of Asia need to follow different strategies for revitalizing irrigation systems? If so, what could those strategies be? The purpose of the paper is to address these questions and provide a list of innovative suggestions for revitalizing Asia's irrigation.From supporting famed hydraulic civilizations in the ancient past to spearheading Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, irrigation has always played a pivotal role in the agrarian economy of Asia. Indeed, it is equally true that many ancient civilizations like that of Angkor in Southeast Asia collapsed due to failure in irrigation management. It therefore comes as no surprise that Asia accounts for the bulk of irrigated area in the world (70% of all irrigated area) and is home to some of the largest as well as oldest surface irrigation schemes. Largest, and oldest, as they may be, Asia's surface irrigation sector is also beset with a number of often intractable problems. Important among these is the consistent under-performance of irrigation schemes -most often than not, these deliver much more water than required for head end farmers and irrigate much less land than they were originally designed to do, thereby affecting the tailend farmers. This results in low land and water productivity; low returns on investments; end users (farmers) disinterest and apathy in these systems and eventual exit, if they have such an option, from these formal irrigation systems. At the heart of these problems is the low accountability of the irrigation officials to their farmer clients and this is often exacerbated by technical design problems.The purpose of this paper is to present a menu of options that has the potential of revitalizing Asia's irrigation by gearing it towards the dual aim of poverty alleviation in poorest parts of Asia and helping in diversification and expanding livelihood options in the more dynamic parts, so that, Asia as a continent, can continue to grow more food with less water to feed an ever increasing population in face of unprecedented challenge of climate change. 3 How much more food and water by 2050?Asia's population will reach 5 billion by 2050. How much more food would we need by then? Table 1 respectively. A large portion of this comes directly from rainfall that infiltrates the soil to generate soil moisture, while the rest is met by irrigation withdrawn from surface and groundwater sources and delivered to farm fields. Figure 1 shows the area under rainfed and irrigated agriculture in South, East and Central Asia.

Irrigation management is facing complex challenges evolving with the transformation of agriculture, competition over resources, environmental concerns, without forgetting the critical objective of food production. Managers are ill prepared to meet these challenges and the FAO called for and initiated a massive retraining programme of engineers and managers on irrigation system modernization to address these issues, starting in Asia. Results from this first generation of interventions confirmed the lack of success of many investments and institutional reforms, gaps in capacity and training and the potential for achieving significant improvements at minimal cost by focusing on system operation. The FAO prepared new guidelines for improving system operation and management (MASSCOTE) based on service-oriented management concepts, tested them through training workshops in Nepal, India and China and is disseminating them through a second-generation training programme building on first-generation knowledge synthesis. This paper presents the FAO's strategic approach to capacity building on service-oriented management. It builds on the major lessons drawn from past programmes and is based on three interrelated thrusts: at the system, state and regional/global levels. Concepts, methodologies, lessons learned on upscaling to policy and long-term investment planning, limitations and conditions for success and future programme development are discussed. Copyright RÉ SUMÉLa gestion de l'irrigation est confrontée à des défis complexes en évolution avec la transformation de l'agriculture, la concurrence sur les ressources, les préoccupations environnementales, sans oublier l'objectif critique de la production alimentaire. Les gestionnaires sont mal préparés pour répondre à ces défis et la FAO a lancé un vaste programme de nouvelle formation des ingénieurs et cadres sur la modernisation des systèmes d'irrigation pour traiter ces questions, en commençant par l'Asie. Les résultats de cette première génération d'interventions ont confirmé le manque de succès de beaucoup d'investissements et de réformes institutionnelles, les lacunes dans les capacités et la formation et les possibilités de parvenir à des améliorations significatives à peu de frais en se concentrant sur le fonctionnement du système. La FAO a élaboré de nouveaux guides pour améliorer l'exploitation The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Irrigated agriculture is undergoing rapid change and is facing issues related to climate change, population growth, consumption patterns, competition for resources and cost of development. The challenge is whether water availability for irrigation along with rainfed production will be sufficient to meet growing food demand and improve global food security. Traditionally governments have been responsible for developments in the irrigation sector through planning, design and construction of projects. Trends toward decentralization, fiscal crisis and growth of the private sector have led government to divest some of its role to user organizations and the private sector. This has been known as the participatory approach to irrigation management and has been adopted widely by many countries with a range of institutional arrangements. Many irrigation and drainage schemes worldwide perform below their capacity. To modernize and improve this capacity will require innovation and technical advancement, but in addition issues of policy, governance, management and institution must be addressed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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