irrigation in sudan since independence

American Geographical Society

Irrigation in Sudan since IndependenceAuthor(s): Bret WallachSource: Geographical Review, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Oct., 1988), pp. 417-434Published by: American Geographical SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/215092 .

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IRRIGATION IN SUDAN SINCE INDEPENDENCE*

BRET WALLACH

ABSTRACT. Four million feddans in Sudan are irrigated. Half of the total was developed since 1955, and production in the previously irrigated areas has been intensified. Despite these achievements, the schemes are not operating well. Aid agencies, chiefly the World Bank, have lent more than $700 million to build, maintain, and rehabilitate them, but these programs promote high technologies and assign a passive role to farmers. A cooperative program between researchers and farmers might lead to a better form of irrigated agriculture.

THE history of irrigation in Sudan may conveniently be divided into three periods: precolonial, colonial, and postindependence or after 1955. The first two periods have been the subject of many studies, but relatively

little has been published on postindependence irrigation.' An exception was the resettlement of some 25,000 people whose traditional home at Halfa was flooded with the completion of the high dam at Aswan.2 Since independence there have been other important changes in Sudanese irrigated agriculture. The command area of the Gezira was doubled in the late 1950s and early 1960s to two million feddans, and during the 1970s the cropping intensity of the older part of the scheme was raised by 50 percent. New projects have also been undertaken, not only the 400,000 feddans at New Halfa but also the 300,000 feddans of the Rahad scheme, on the right bank of the Blue Nile opposite the Gezira. In the past decade, almost $1 billion have been budgeted for rehabilitating and improving the country's schemes, and much more will probably be spent on this task in the future.

THE GEZIRA

At independence on 1 January 1956, the Republic of Sudan had approximately two million feddans under the command of irrigation canals. One- half of that total was in the Gezira scheme, a gravity project on the left bank of the Blue Nile; most of the remainder was in pump schemes on the Nile downstream from Khartoum and on the left bank of the White Nile down-

* I acknowledge the helpful criticism of an early draft of this article by Herbert G. Farbrother. Research was conducted between 1985 and 1988, when the author was a program officer in Sudan for the Ford Foundation. The viewpoints expressed here are his and not necessarily those of the Ford Foundation. 1 Agriculture in Sudan (edited by J. D. Tothill; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948); K. M. Barbour, The Republic of the Sudan (London: University of London Press, 1961); J. H. G. Lebon, Land Use in the Sudan (London: Geographical Publications, 1965); Arthur Gaitskell, Gezira: A Study of De- velopment (London: Faber and Faber, 1959). 2 Hassan Dafalla, The Nubian Exodus (London: C. Hurst, 1975); M. E. Abu Sin, Planners' and Participants' Perceptions of Development in the Semi-Arid Lands of Sudan: A Case Study of the Khashm el Girba Scheme, in Natural Resources and Rural Development in Arid Lands: Case Studies from Sudan (edited by H. R. J. Davies; Tokyo: United Nations University, 1975), 60-80.

* DR. WALLACH is an associate professor of geography at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma 73019.



418 THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

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stream from Kosti (Fig. 1). There were small spate schemes at Tokar on the Red Sea coast and on the inland Gash delta near Kassala. With the exception of some pump schemes on the main Nile, all the works had been built to generate export revenues from the sale of long-staple cotton and were farmed by sharecropping tenants. Most of the pump schemes were privately owned and operated under governmental license. The others were operated by the government or by parastatals, of which the Sudan Gezira Board was the most important.



SUDANESE IRRIGATION

These irrigation schemes were hugely important to the economy of Sudan. Since the opening of the initial 300,000 feddans of the Gezira in the late 1920s, cotton has provided most of the export earnings for the country, and its irrigation potential was by no means exhausted. To begin planning for future development, the British in the early 1950s hired a consulting firm to evaluate the remaining opportunities for irrigation along the Blue Nile. The firm calculated that the irrigated command in Sudan could be doubled, as in fact it has been, and recommended construction of the Kenana scheme, a gigantic gravity project on the scale of the Gezira, as well as several pump schemes.3 The Kenana scheme would have reclaimed one million feddans on the southern part of the Gezira plain by canals that diverged from the Blue Nile at a new storage reservoir at Roseires, near the Ethiopian border.

Independent Sudan could not afford to build the Roseires reservoir, and the World Bank and other donors were unwilling to lend or give money for the project until Egypt agreed to a modification of the existing diversion from the Nile. The Egyptians, hoping for political union with Sudan, signed a generous treaty in 1959. It is still in force and multiplies nearly sevenfold the amount of water that a 1929 agreement assigned to Sudan. Under the 1959 treaty Sudan may withdraw twenty of the eighty cubic kilometers of water that the Nile carries between the two countries in an average year. With assistance from the bank and the West German government, the Ro- seires reservoir was finished in 1966. Ironically, by then the Kenana scheme had been abandoned as too expensive.

Much of the water impounded at Roseires was used to expand and in- tensify agriculture in the Gezira. Anticipating construction of Roseires and postponement of Kenana, the Sudanese government in 1956 built new outlet gates at Sennar Dam, the masonry structure on the Blue Nile at the head of the Gezira canal system. The new gates were to control the release of water to a new set of canals commanding a one-million-feddan western addition to the Gezira. When completed in 1963, this Managil extension, named for the largest existing settlement in the area, doubled the command of the Gezira, whose older part was thereafter called the Gezira Main (Fig. 2). The entire scheme is managed by the Sudan Gezira Board from its headquarters at Barakat near Wad Medani. The board operates from a two-story yellow- brick bungalow, with green verandas and a courtyard seasonally bright with bougainvilleas.

The Managil extension resembled the Gezira Main in fundamental ways. Straight minor canals branched off major ones at intervals of 1,420 meters in parallel ranks, like teeth from the back of a comb. At intervals of 280 meters along each minor, a wrought-iron "field-outlet pipe" passed under- neath the canal bank and led to a small ditch, called an abu ishreen, that ran in a straight line, generally perpendicular to the minor, for nearly 1,400

3 Estimate of Irrigable Areas in the Sudan, 1951-3, report to the government of Sudan by Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners, London, 1954.

419



THE GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW

Detail of Field Layout

(Canals 1420 M-Apart)

+T

THE GEZIRA SCHEME

0 10 20 30 I i , J km

FIG. 2-The Gezira Scheme. Sources: Map-Euroconsult, text footnote 25; detail-Agriculture in Sudan, text footnote 1.

420



SUDANESE IRRIGATION

meters before stopping short of the next. A rectangular ninety-feddan field or number was thus bounded by two minors and two abu ishreens. Each number was subdivided into smaller plots watered from a tiny ditch or abu sitta that took water from an abu ishreen and carried it across the high end of each plot. Tenancies were laid crosswise across several numbers so that a tenant had plots in a narrow rectangle parallel to a minor canal. The same distinctive setup can be found on most of the pump schemes in Sudan.

Managil tenancies were much smaller than those in the Gezira Main. Instead of four ten-feddan plots, tenants received three five-feddan holdings. Sudanese planners deserve much credit for implementing this change, because they were struggling to correct a scandal on the Gezira Main: tenants, despising field labor, had become absentee farmers by relying on hired help throughout the year, not only at picking time. By reducing the tenancy size, the planners hoped to make such arrangements uneconomic.

They failed in this effort, because only one-half of each tenancy on the Gezira Main was worked during any season, but at Managil it was decided that there would be no fallow. The cultivated area of fifteen feddans, in other words, was not far short of the twenty cultivated in the Gezira Main. The case for hired labor on the Managil was actually stronger than on the Gezira Main, where most tenancies were split into twenty-feddan half-tenancies, as the first generation willed its property to the next. If hired labor was economic on the ten cropped feddans of a half-tenancy on the Main, it was probably economic on the fifteen cropped ones of the Managil extension, even with allowances for somewhat poorer soil and water conditions.

The Managil extension did not consume all the water made available at Roseires, and to use more of it the agriculture of the Gezira Main was intensified in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Significantly the Gezira Board believed cooperation between researchers and tenants was the best method to realize the goals of intensification. As early as 1951, the board had established a "village farming" experiment involving a hundred or so tenant farmers in a program to test ways to diversify cropping practices under field conditions.4 The introduction of peanuts and a new cropping pattern resulted. Since the 1930s the scheme had operated with a cropping intensity of 50 percent in a complex pattern equivalent to a rotational unit of four numbers: two fallow, one in cotton, and one divided between sorghum and fodder for use by tenants and their livestock. Peanuts replaced fodder, and winter wheat was grown during the first of the two resting years that had formerly pre- ceded cotton. Cropping intensity rose from 50 percent to 75 percent.

Watering practices necessarily changed to accommodate the new pattern. Formerly the Ministry of Irrigation had delivered enough water into the minor canals to cover the cotton numbers to a depth of ten centimeters every two weeks, with twelve waterings in the season. For those numbers in cotton in any year, guards released water from the minors through the field-outlet

4 A Note on the Village Farming Experiment: Wad El Naim, Sudan Gezira Board, Barakat, 1958.

421




pipes into the abu ishreens on a schedule of seven days on and seven off. During an on period the upper tenants took water into their abu sittas in the first few days of the watering week; the lower tenants then took their turn. By balancing one cotton number against the next-one taking water while the other did not-the canals could be kept running continuously, with water being drawn from the minors at a constant rate. Fodder and grain crops were irrigated irregularly with unscheduled deliveries of surplus water in the system, perhaps the result of rain, which could suddenly reduce the water requirement of the cotton. A more difficult problem arose with farmers who were unwilling to tend at night to the close work of irrigating their plots, but this was solved by closing the outlets to the abu ishreens at dusk. The water accumulated in the minors until the outlets were opened the next morning. The practice seems to be inflexible clockwork, and indeed it was in the sense that an open abu ishreen conveyed 5,000 cubic meters of water every twelve hours. But the system was also flexible. After a heavy rain, for example, water would be diverted to the fodder and sorghum numbers, even to the fallows, if necessary. Two weeks later, however, every cotton field would need water urgently, and special schedules had to be prepared to deliver it.5

Every ten-feddan plot of cotton was supposed to be banked up to nearly 200 tiny basins that would be flooded in groups of ten during the three-day irrigation period. As cropping intensified, farmers were forced to devise less labor-intensive methods. They learned, without the assistance, the direction, or even the approval of the board, to open the bank of their abu sittas at six or seven places simultaneously and, using a small but controlled stream flow, to flood their ten-feddan plots as one basin. There were times, particularly at the first watering of wheat, when the farmers would continue to use the old basin method, but the new "open plan" saved so much work that by the early 1970s it was the rule, though never officially recognized or approved.6

Farmers no longer had to tend to their fields from dawn to dusk while irrigating; they irrigated their untended fields at night. This procedure ended the night-storage system, at least in practice, although the operating rules of the scheme were never revised. Ministry engineers still often insist that field outlets are closed at night, but board guards long ago gave up their control of the outlets. One study reports that, if they want water, four tenants in five open field outlets.7 With round-the-clock releases and only occasional closures of the outlets, the daily flow into each open abu ishreen inevitably declined from 5,000 cubic meters to approximately 3,000. The decline might have been far greater than that, because the outlets to the noncotton numbers

5 Gezira Canal Regulation Handbook (Khartoum: Department of Irrigation, 1934), 4. 6 H. G. Farbrother, Modernization of Indenting in the Gezira Scheme, in Water Distribution in Sudanese Agriculture (edited by Osman A. Fadl and Charles Bailey; Wad Medani: University of Gezira, 1984), 78-93. 7 Abdelgadir Mohamed Ahmed and Mary Tiffin, Water Management in the Gezira Scheme, Sudan: A Survey of Farmers' Attitudes on Two Minor Canals, Hydraulics Research Report OD 76, Wal- lingford, U.K., 1986, 18.

422



SUDANESE IRRIGATION

also remained open most of the time. Beginning in 1968, the ministry began raising the water level in the main canals some fifteen centimeters above the previous full-supply level. The volume of water actually distributed to a group of four numbers consequently increased from 5,000 cubic meters daily during a cotton-watering week, plus a variable quantity for the other crops, to almost 9,000 cubic meters every week of the season.8

In the midst of these fundamental changes in the Gezira's cropping pattern and water management, the World Bank sent what was termed a study mission to spend the 1965-66 season on the Gezira to devise ways to increase tenant income. The motive was simple: the bank then had an investment of $47 million in the Gezira: a 1960 loan of $15 million to support construction at Managil, the first loan for irrigation made by the bank in Sudan, and a $32-million loan made in 1961 for the reservoir at Roseires.

The mission members conducted an unsuccessful search for alternative crops that would be more profitable than cotton. For example, they considered introducing perennial fodder crops, but they worried unnecessarily, it seems, that perennial irrigation might damage the structure of the heavy clays. They weighed conversion from extralong- to medium-staple cotton. Price prospects for the latter were no better than for long-staple, but the shorter version was thought to use less water and to have higher yield ceilings. The two varieties unfortunately cannot be grown close to each other without increasing insect populations. Because the mission did not recommend the complete abandonment of long-staple cotton, conversion to medium-staple came only to isolated parts of the scheme.9 The failure to identify alternatives was sobering; indeed agronomists are still at a loss to recommend crops that would be more profitable than cotton on the Gezira.

The most important recommendation of the study mission was the ab- olition of the "joint account" under which the board took a share of the cotton-crop proceeds. The mission wanted tenants to have greater incentives to maximize production, and it argued that they should have full value of their crop, less deductions for taxes and services provided by the ministry and the board. The proposed land-and-water charge, however, was rejected by the government, but the bank did not abandon the issue. Fifteen years later when the government faced such low prices, reduced revenues, and deteriorating project maintenance that additional funding was necessary, the bank granted an emergency loan, conditional on acceptance of land-and- water charges.

NEW HALFA AND RAHAD

In 1961, while seeking ways to use Roseires water, the bank had appraised as a substitute for the Kenana scheme a 600,000-feddan right-bank Blue Nile

8 H. G. Farbrother, Irrigation Practices in the Gezira, Cotton Research Corporation Research Memoirs 89, London, 1974. 9 Gezira Study Mission Report, World Bank, Washington, D.C., 1966.

423




scheme known as the Rahad. The project would have taken water directly from Roseires, as Gezira does from Sennar. The outlet gates to such a canal were actually built at Roseires, but they lead nowhere, because the scheme, with a cost estimated in 1961 at $140 million, was set aside as being too expensive. Perhaps it was as well, for Sudan was busy at the time expanding and intensifying the Gezira, and much effort was being expended to develop New Halfa.

There 7,000 Halfawi families, whose home villages were submerged by the impoundment from the high Aswan Dam, were resettled at Egyptian expense 300 kilometers east of the Gezira on the upper Atbara River. Because the Halfawis were giving up freeholds on the Nile, they were given tiny freeholds at New Halfa. This exchange was unique on a government-funded Sudanese irrigation project, but the 24,000 feddans assigned to the Halfawis were in a sense insignificant, because the scheme brought an additional 330,000 feddans under command for the settlement of approximately 20,000 local nomadic families, who, as at Managil, were to be allocated fifteen- feddan tenancies cultivated without fallow.10

Construction of the Khashim el Girba Dam began in 1959, and the first settlement occurred in 1964. The reservoir silted so fast that by 1977 half its storage capacity was lost. To reduce the costs of canalization, most of the minor canals were spaced twice as far apart as the interval on the Gezira. Consequently the abu ishreens were generally twice as long as those of the Gezira, and water did not flow to the distant tenancies. The Halfawis felt that they were not given the services that had been promised when they agreed to leave Halfa, and most of them deserted the scheme during its first decade. The nomads were equally unhappy, because the New Halfa Agri- cultural Production Corporation wanted them to grow cotton and was un- interested in livestock. Assailed by problems, New Halfa actually irrigated and irrigates today less than 150,000 of the 400,000 feddans under command.

Thus when Sudan built a truncated Rahad scheme in the 1970s, planners were well aware that the new, long-delayed project might develop acute problems. Perhaps that awareness explains the innovations adopted by the project planners for the 300,000-feddan scheme, which in 1973 was estimated to cost $125 million, of which the World Bank, Kuwait, and USAID together would contribute $40 million.T" The new Rahad was an immense pump scheme taking water from the Nile far below Roseires to supplement the seasonal spate of the River Rahad. Numbers were laid out with the geometric precision and the tenancies common to irrigated agriculture in Sudan, but the project planners attempted to introduce mechanized production of medium-staple cotton to be irrigated by long furrows. Instead of replicating the

10 New Halfa Rehabilitation Project Phase II, report to Sudan's Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, Agrar- und Hydrotechnik, Essen, 1980, 6. '1 Sudan: Rahad Irrigation Project, World Bank Appraisal Report PA-439b, Washington, D.C., 1973; Roseires Pre-Investment Survey, prepared in cooperation with Sir M. Macdonald and Partners for the government of Sudan, London, 1964-65.

424



SUDANESE IRRIGATION

long-established Gezira methods of basin flooding, tenants were expected to take water through batches of siphons feeding furrows 280 meters long across each ten-feddan plot.

Long furrows had been advocated by the 1954 consultancy that had proposed the Kenana scheme. Although the choice was not explained, pre- sumably the consultants considered long furrows a good method of applying water quickly and efficiently, without waterlogging. However, long furrows function best on precisely leveled land, and leveling is costly. Additionally the heavy clays laid down by the Blue Nile do not absorb water, except through the deep cracks that open when the soil is dry.12 Quick irrigation was therefore not a good way to water the soil thoroughly.13 Another problem was the likely disappearance of water down one crack and reappearance from another in a neighboring furrow, which would disrupt the even application 6f water to all furrows.

In 1975, when inflation was rapid and energy costs were soaring, the project was reappraised at a cost of $320 million. The bank added another $20 million, and the Kuwaitis contributed $40 million. Approximately $4 million was budgeted for leveling, but by 1983 estimates of the cost for it had risen to $50 million. Finally, only 30,000 feddans, a tenth of the project, were leveled, with costs continuing to rise. The other problems with long furrows such as adequate wetting and uniform application compelled Rahad tenants to abandon long furrows even on the leveled areas. The technology itself was finally condemned as an "inappropriate technology choice" in the bank's own project-completion report.14

Rahad I was actually finished in 1983 at a total cost of $400 million. Development of the 300,000 feddans of Rahad II was indefinitely postponed. Mechanized harvesting had meanwhile proved uneconomic.15 Farmers returned to the irrigation and cultivation methods of the Gezira. Medium- staple cotton prices fell, and many tenants found themselves in debt to the Rahad Corporation for services charges. From its first crop season, the corporation adopted the bank's prescribed policy of land-and-water charges. For political reasons, the corporation dared not bill tenants for more than half its costs and overheads, and the result was that it, like many of its tenants, became a chronic debtor.

REHABILITATION

The Ministry of Irrigation in the late 1970s hoped to start construction of Rahad II and to build a 500,000-feddan project on the Atbara River above New Halfa. Most of all, perhaps, the ministry wanted to raise the crest of

12 Gezira Study, footnote 9 above, Annex 3, Appendix 1, 17. 13 Farbrother, footnote 8 above, 86. 14 Rahad Irrigation Project: Project Completion Report, World Bank Credit Report 364-2-SU, Wash- ington, D.C., 1983, 49. 15 Sudan: The Rahad Irrigation Project, Project Impact Evaluation Report 31, U.S. Agency for Inter- national Development, Washington, D.C., 1982, C-3.

425




Roseires Dam, whose reservoir, like the one at New Halfa, was rapidly silting. The enthusiasm of the ministry was fortified by consultant studies funded by the bank's Rahad I credit. Charged with recommending investment prior- ities, the consultants admitted that the largest economic returns would come from further intensification of the Gezira; nonetheless, they considered new projects a preferable alternative, because Gezira tenants had already benefited from public investment.16

Disregarding these inclinations, the bank conducted a review of Sudanese agriculture in 1979 and called for a halt to construction of new irrigation works. The emphasis was shifted to rehabilitation of existing ones.17 Such a recommendation from any other source would have been ignored, but the role of the bank in Sudanese irrigation development was too large to be ignored. Since 1979 no major new irrigation project has been initiated in Sudan.

Facts supporting the bank's position are not difficult to obtain. New Halfa was operating with a cropping intensity of 30 percent, one-third of the total for which it had been designed. Most pumping schemes in Sudan were in equally bad condition. Low cotton prices caused the abandonment of half of them by 1968, and most of the ones still operating were nationalized in a so-called land reform welcomed by the owners.18 The government bought and took over 439 schemes on the White Nile, 314 on the Blue Nile, and one hundred downstream from Khartoum, all but the smallest schemes. The owners invested the proceeds in more profitable ventures, and tenants became dependent on state corporations that were no more able to make a profit than the licensees had been (Fig. 3).

The old spate system on the Gash delta was suffering badly. This primitive system comprised 180,000 feddans crossed by several parallel canals that irrigated through selected outlets opened during the month-long flood. Water was allowed to flow through each outlet in a fan-shaped lobe stretching to the next canal, but water was so limited that only one-third of the outlets were opened in any season.19 In a reorganization similar to that for the pump schemes, the Gash had been taken over in 1967 by a new entity called the Gash Delta Agricultural Corporation, but it was unable to irrigate even one- third of the project command. It abandoned cotton and shifted to drought- tolerant castor.

16 Nile Waters Study, report to the government of Sudan by Coyne and Bellier in association with Hunting Technical Services, Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners, and Sir M. Macdonald and Partners, 1979, 150. 17 Sudan: Agricultural Sector Survey, World Bank Report 1836a-SU, Washington, D.C., 1979, iii. 18 R. F. Wynn, An Exploration of the Long Term Prospects for the Further Development of Nile Waters in the Sudan for Irrigation and Hydroelectric Power (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Manchester, 1968); Taisier Ahmed Ali and Jay O'Brien, Labor, Community and Protest in Sudanese Agriculture, in The Politics of Agriculture in Tropical Africa (edited by Jonathan Barker; Beverly Hills, Cal.: Sage Publications, 1984), 205-238. 19 C. H. Swan, The Recorded Behavior of the River Gash in the Sudan (Khartoum: Ministry of Irrigation, 1956); C. H. Richards, The Gash Delta, Bulletin 3, Ministry of Agriculture, Khartoum, 1950.

426



SUDANESE IRRIGATION

i i'

PUMP-IRRIGATED AREAS ON THE WHITE NILE

NEAR ED DUEIM

Ed Dueim

km

The developet command \ <o of the schemes shown

/ I^S^ is approximately i,N Jto ,S85,000 acres.

u

I I

t/

Umm Gar < Island

-I

FIG. 3-Pump-Irrigated Areas near Ed Dueim. Source: Nile Waters Study, text footnote 16.

0 Pumps

S. GFELLER

1

427




Worst of all, cotton production on the Gezira during the second half of the 1970s had been cut in half, as low prices and high input costs left tenants with little interest in cotton and the board with reduced means of providing necessary production services. Morale was low; a World Bank staff member working in Sudan at the time reported that "a sense of helplessness pervades the once dynamic Sudan Gezira Board."20

The government then acceded to the bank's long-frustrated desire for land-and-water charges. In turn, the bank lent $65 million in 1980 for imported spare parts, fertilizers, and pesticides; the European Community added $10 million to the first of what today have become three "agricultural rehabilitation projects." Strikes by tenants in 1979 and again in 1980 protesting the new arrangement delayed planting so long that cotton yields those years were severely depressed. The tenants gradually, in public at least, accepted the new system, so that by 1984 production had returned to its 1975 levels. Yet the new system still depends on an attractive balance between cotton prices and heavily subsidized service charges. The land-and-water charge for cotton, for example, was initially set at $30 an acre, even though the board was spending about $20 for fertilizer and $60 for pesticides in addition to operating the canal system.21 Since then the charges have tripled, but so have input costs, which are largely borne by continued foreign aid, particularly the agricultural-rehabilitation projects themselves. Should the tenants ever be forced to bear them in full, enthusiasm for cotton could decline again.

The annual bill to Sudan for such imported inputs is approximately $130 million, or one-half the value of the cotton crop. In 1983 the bank was obliged to advance another $50 million, and the European Community provided an additional $10 million.22 Other donors contributed heavily: West Germany independently gave the Gezira Board $70 million worth of herbicides and pesticides in 1985. Still the demand was not satisfied, and in 1987 a third loan, for $85 million, was prepared by the bank and the European Com- munity.23 The bank loans are long-term and interest free, while the other contributions are gifts. Sudan is relatively lightly burdened by them, but the Sudanese realize that donor patience may not be infinite. There is a widespread conviction among the aid agencies in Khartoum that more fundamental changes must come to the schemes, so that help can eventually be discontinued.

20 J. Shivakumar, Sudan: Agricultural Rehabilitation Program Credits, in Proceedings of the Fifth Agriculture Sector Symposium (edited by Ted. J. Davis; Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1985), 179- 188.

21 Sudan: Preparation Study of a Special Import Programme for the Irrigated Sub-Sector, report prepared for the European Development Fund by Macdonald Agricultural Services, Cambridge, U.K., 1987, 42. 22 Sudan: Agricultural Rehabilitation Program-II, World Bank Report and Recommendation to the President P-3591-SU, Washington, D.C., 1983. 23 Sudan: Agricultural Rehabilitation Program-III, World Bank Report and Recommendation to the President P-4684-SU, Washington, D.C., 1987.

428



SUDANESE IRRIGATION

To that end the bank between 1980 and 1983 made a series of loans for rehabilitation of individual schemes, with funds for new equipment and vehicles and for improved buildings, roads, and water-distribution facilities. New Halfa came first in 1980, with a loan of $40 million. The next year, the bank made two loans of approximately $30 million each for the Blue Nile and White Nile pump schemes.24 In 1983 a $260-million package was put together for the Gezira, with a bank contribution of $80 million and large additional sums from Saudi Arabia, Japan, and the United Kingdom.25 In- dependently the British undertook to rehabilitate a group of schemes whose original construction costs they had subsidized a decade earlier.26 Then, in 1986, the Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development lent $10 million for others still farther downstream.27 A 1987 rehabilitation plan for the Gash delta has yet to be funded.28 The Rahad, though new, is the focus of a bank loan of $22 million to improve farming practices on Sudanese irrigation schemes. Research is a principal component of the project, along with the introduction of the bank's "train and visit" method of agricultural extension.29

The rehabilitation projects have disappointed everyone concerned. The rehabilitation of the Blue and White Nile pump schemes was scheduled to have been completed in 1986, when the loans expired, but only one-third of the $30 million in the White Nile loan had been disbursed by then. The bank canceled the rest, except for $2 million to be spent on studies and $11 million for works that were to be completed within a year. At the end of the rehabilitation period, the amount of land producing cotton on the schemes had fallen from 63,000 acres to 54,000 acres, and the foreign-exchange cost of production inputs exceeded earnings from cotton sales. The Blue Nile rehabilitation was not much better: several million dollars of that credit were canceled. By 1987 the British were seriously considering cutting off their support for northern pump-scheme rehabilitation, because the Sudanese government refused to guarantee that it would implement a program to recover full operating and maintenance costs.

24 Sudan: White Nile Pump Schemes Rehabilitation Project, World Bank Appraisal Report 3022-SU, Washington, D.C., 1981; Sudan: Blue Nile Pump Schemes Rehabilitation Project, World Bank Ap- praisal Report 3985-SU, Washington, D.C., 1981. 25 Sudan: Gezira Rehabilitation Project, World Bank Appraisal Report 4218-SU, Washington, D.C., 1983; Gezira Rehabilitation and Modernization Project I, report prepared for the government of Sudan by Euroconsult in cooperation with Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners, Cambridge, U.K., 1982. 26 Reappraisal of the Northern Nile Province Pump Schemes, report prepared for the government of Sudan by Sir M. Macdonald and Partners in association with Hunting Technical Services and Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners, Cambridge, U.K., 1979. 27 Sudan: IFAD Northern Region Agricultural Rehabilitation Project, World Bank Appraisal Report 4549-SU, Washington, D.C., 1983; Sudan: Northern Province Irrigation Rehabilitation Project, World Bank Appraisal Report 6404-SU, Washington, D.C., 1986. 28 Rehabilitation of Gash Delta Agricultural Project, report prepared for the government of Sudan by Euroconsult, Sir Alexander Gibb and Partners in association with Newtech, London, 1987. 29 Sudan: Agricultural Research, Extension and Training in the Irrigated Subsector, World Bank Appraisal Report 5320-SU, Washington, D.C., 1985.

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Of all the rehabilitation projects, the largest was for the Gezira. It was the most important project in another sense, because innovations there were likely to be adopted at other schemes. It is especially significant therefore that the Gezira rehabilitation was uniquely conceived in two stages. First would come rehabilitation proper and then modernization. The rehabilitation phase, covered by the 1983 loan, included new vehicles, equipment, and buildings for the Sudan Gezira Board, replacement of the hydraulic- control works on the canal system, improvements to the scheme's unpaved roads and light railway, and a wireless, solar-powered telephone system donated by Japan for canal operations. To ensure that work proceeded on schedule, a special project-management unit was created, and the bank em- ployed an irrigation engineer who was assisted by a bank economist already working at the Ministry of Agriculture. The modernization phase was to update the restored Gezira. To determine what modern meant, funds were included in the rehabilitation project for pilot farms where experiments in modernization could be performed on actual tenancies.

It is absurd to evaluate a project that has yet to be prepared, let alone executed, but doubts are already in order about the modernization program. There is a certain perversity in installing more than 30,000 new field-outlet pipes in the name of rehabilitation, when there is no clear idea how water should be managed in a modernized Gezira. Specifically the new outlets are designed, as the British ones were, to release an adjustable quantity of water, with a peak equal to that of the replaced outlets. Yet research from the pilot farms might show that this amount of water is not needed and that a simple valve-either fully opened or fully closed-might be preferable. The choices of a smaller outlet or one differently controlled are now effectively foreclosed.

The urgency of rehabilitation, it may be stated in defense of the program, did not allow a logical progression from research to a project whose standards were compatible with modernization, yet it is doubtful that conditions on the scheme were so dire. The old telephone system of the Gezira had ceased to function in the 1960s, but canal operations continued without interruption. Gatekeepers at branching points no longer released measured quantities of water as they formerly did, but they did discharge quantities proportional to the size of the downstream irrigated areas. Maintenance was so inadequate that emergency dredging was necessary to clear silt from the heads of minor canals, yet water deliveries to abu ishreens were astonishingly close to the amounts that farmers needed, or so it appears from the few studies of system performance that are based on water measurements.30

Unfortunately the rehabilitation project was more than precipitous: it brought such a heavily top-down approach to research on the pilot farms that modernization is likely not only to be constrained by the results of

30 M. R. H. Francis and R. D. Hinton, An Interim Report on the Diagnostic Stage of a Study of the Management of Minor Canals in the Gezira Irrigation Scheme, Sudan, Hydraulics Research Report OD93, Wallingford, U.K., 1987.

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rehabilitation but also to ignore the wishes of tenants and laborers. The situation might not be so bad if the ideas of the bank and the Sudanese authorities were suited to actual farming conditions on the Gezira, but they are not. They are reminiscent of nothing so much as the failed mechanization, leveling, and long-furrow irrigation approach tried and abandoned at Rahad.

The intellectual atmosphere in which the work of the pilot farms is proceeding was well illustrated in 1987, when Irish consultants submitted the first of several immense studies that were commissioned as part of the preparation for the modernization project.31 The study was devastating in its criticism of tenant-laborer relations on the scheme: it estimated that some 85 percent of the labor on the entire scheme was done by hired hands, not by tenants and their families-one-half of whom no longer did any field work. Most of the laborers on the scheme are seasonal, arriving for the cotton harvest early each year, but there are also some 630,000 permanent residents of the scheme who are either landless laborers or their dependents. They constitute a population more than half as large as the 1.1 million members of tenant families. Although tenants live in villages of mud-brick houses, with schools, electricity, and domestic water pumped from wells into over- head tanks, laborers live in grass huts erected in separate, canal-side villages without schools or electricity. Their domestic water comes from canals in- fested with schistosomes, and the group is disregarded by officials, who assert that the workers hide their considerable wealth.

The task of the consultants was to examine the Gezira's livestock, an important subject because the average tenant derives one-third of his income from animals. The attention to hired labor was based on the surprising discovery that two-fifths of the livestock on the scheme belonged to the laborers, not to the tenants. The study raised an extremely sensitive issue when it suggested that efforts to improve animal husbandry had to include laborer-owned livestock. It went on, unfortunately, to state that improvement required not simply fodder but the reconstitution of long-delayed veterinary services and efforts at breeding and at introduction of dietary supplements and better marketing. The logic of this recommendation is clear, but it as- sumes that modernization requires wholesale upgrading of Gezira infrastruc- ture and the adaptation of residents to a new order. There is no evidence that tenants were queried or that the consultants considered the feasibility of their proposals.

Such thinking recalls the village-farming experiments of the 1950s and the 1960s as evidence from a different world, and so it is with the pilot farms. The tenants on them do not participate in the decisions about experimental practices and have no choice except to participate. They are told what fields are to be leveled, in some cases with laser-guided equipment; that peanuts are to be planted by machine, not by hand; and that selected numbers are

31 Gezira Livestock Integration Study: Final Report, prepared for Gezira Rehabilitation Project Man- agement Unit, Khartoum, by DEVCO in association with RIM Ltd., Dublin, 1987, II-94.

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to be irrigated with long furrows and night storage. The tenants are not told that they are expected to bear the cost of leveling, and no thought has been given to the effect of the machinery on the livelihood of landless laborers. There is no intention of comparing the agronomic and economic pros and cons of the existing open-plan, continuous-flow irrigation system with the "improved" ones to be tested.

By the start of the 1987-88 crop year, the eleven cotton numbers in the forty-four numbers of one pilot farm had been equipped with new field outlets that were to be closed at night, not because night storage was de- monstrably better than continuous flow, but because the authorities were dogmatically convinced that the Gezira should have night storage. Leveling was being done. The contractor was certain that the benefits of leveling would not justify its cost, although approximately one-tenth of the land in the numbers was too high to be properly watered, largely because of silt deposition over the decades. The peanut planters arrived so late that manual planting had to be allowed. Irrigation had not yet begun, but engineers were planning to cover each tenant's plot with ninety furrows and, by precise measurements, to calculate required timings to meet soil-moisture requirements.

A visitor might have predicted trouble: tenants refusing to observe night storage and resorting to open-plan irrigation when long furrows did not function, or simply losing interest in their crops when yields appeared to be low. At the end of the season, nobody could draw conclusions from the experiment, because crops on the pilot farm had failed entirely and had been abandoned. The board blamed the Ministry of Irrigation for failing to deliver the needed quantity of water; the irrigation engineers replied that the location of the pilot farm at the tail end of a canal was unsatisfactory. If water supply were sufficient there, the engineers suggested, there would be no need for a rehabilitation project. The comment is rhetorical, because dredging would have been a sufficient cure for the problem, but it indicates the dissatisfaction with which the Sudanese themselves perceive the situation.

Ironically, important changes in Gezira cropping patterns have recently been introduced independently of the modernization program and the pilot farms. The board decided in 1986 that the high cropping intensity at Managil was the cause of consistently low and declining yields in the extension. In an amazing demonstration of its power over tenants who had been settled for thirty or more years, the board induced all tenants to give up their tenancies and shift from three plots of five feddans each to four plots each of 3.75 feddans, one of which was to be fallow each year. Most tenants found themselves cropping entirely new plots, in some cases at considerable dis- tances from the lands they formerly worked. Cropping intensity and tenant income were reduced, yet the change was accepted seemingly without protest. Yields may rise, along with per-feddan income, but that is in the future. Meanwhile, trials are being conducted on the Gezira Main to raise intensities

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there to 80 percent with five-plot tenancies of four feddans each, one fallow and one fodder. It seems extraordinary that such immense changes were made without consideration of their effects on project modernization, but it is no more remarkable than the imposition of a new tenancy layout, without consultation, on approximately 50,000 Managil tenants.

OUTLOOK

A top-down orientation is by no means unique to the Gezira. This scheme is no more than representative of the way by which agricultural research is handled in Sudan, as in many other countries. Initial plans of the bank's agricultural-improvement program, for example, suggest that the work will be experiment-station based, so that extension agents will finally be sent out to promote practices that farmers may admire but will usually find useless for their own purposes.32 In the same manner, the pump-scheme rehabilitation program in the far north, sponsored by the International Fund for Agricultural Development, intends to organize farmers into water-user groups, but it ignores the informal cooperatives that farmers long ago formed to operate sagias and, later, clusterings of them that occurred when pumps were introduced during and after the 1930s.33

One might have hoped for more from the Gezira, but judging from the work to date, modernization of that great project is likely to be a failure, with leveling costs absorbed by a government that cannot afford to bear them and with machinery quickly failing for lack of spare parts. All the while, additional agricultural-rehabilitation loans and grants will be required to avoid total collapse of the systems.

Unfortunately the question of raising the crest of Roseires Dam has become ominous. Intensities on the Gezira are already approximately 15 percent less than intended, chiefly because in recent years the Blue Nile flows have been low. Instead of 1.5-million irrigated feddans, the total irrigated area is closer to 1.2 million feddans, and the cotton crop involves only 385,000 feddans, not 500,000. As the storage capacity at Roseires declines, the figures may be expected to fall if nothing is done to raise the height of the dam. A feasible project would increase the capacity of the reservoir so that Sudan would finally use all twenty of the cubic kilometers of water to which it is entitled, not the seventeen presently diverted. However, Egypt now has such severe water shortages that it can ill afford to acquiesce to additional diversion, and some Sudanese irrigation planners are convinced that the work will be indefinitely delayed for political reasons. The prospect is for modernization to call for increased cropping intensities concurrently with decreased water supplies.

32 Annual Work Plans, Agricultural Research Extension and Training Project, Khartoum, 1986. 33 Agricultural Policy/Planning Development in the Northern Region of the Sudan, FAO Technical Report SUD 4409(I), Rome, 1986.

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Perhaps there is a benign alternative. It begins with the recognition that a high-technology approach is unsuited to Sudan and that a genuinely cooperative relationship between researchers and tenants should be the first priority in rehabilitation. Such cooperation is a truism, and the board, ministry, and bank would insist that it exists as it did at the time of the village- farming experiment. However, the cooperation is little more than ritualistic meetings of board officers and tenants gathered in the shade of a tree. In this format, tenants have little say about modernization and do not state the merits or deficiencies of alternative practices. Needed is a sustained working relationship that is difficult to encourage when researchers depend for professional advancement on international publication that is almost always conceived in scientific terms. The problem would not be insuperable if an institution existed to foster application of research results in terms of the working conditions of the tenants. Pilot farms could be a satisfactory frame- work to cooperation between researchers and tenants. A nod from the bank would help the shift of professional assessment.

The outcome of a cooperative research program is a matter of speculation, but there are forceful economic arguments that high-technology methods are inappropriate for Sudan at present and for many years into the future. The practical impediments must be apparent to anyone who has spent any time in the country. A British irrigation engineer working on pump-scheme rehabilitation noted that the small, old-fashioned pumps crudely set up along the Nile are inefficient. Yet he predicted that Sudanese farmers will keep them running long after the efficient, aid-funded pumps that he installs will have broken down for lack of replacement parts and proper maintenance.

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irrigation in sudan since independence

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