Farmers in Pakistan are replacing diesel-fueled pumps with solar energy to power the typical irrigation technique in a large part of the world’s fifth most populous country.
Many farmers rely on the so-called tube wells—a water well and a motorized pump to take water from groundwater. Amid soaring diesel prices and unreliable electricity supply in recent years, more farmers are installing solar panels to help them with crop irrigation.
The solar-powered tube wells provide smoother irrigation. Solar panels have steep upfront costs for a farmer in Pakistan, but they save a lot on energy costs that would have gone for diesel or (often unreliable) grid electricity.
However, as the number of solar-powered pumps has surged in recent years, some experts and analysts fear that farmers who have constant access to energy to irrigate at will could deplete the underground water levels, the so-called water table, in a country that is already under water stress.
The solar power boom in Pakistan’s huge agriculture sector could lead in the longer term to a full-blown water crisis in provinces such as Punjab, Pakistan’s bread basket, and Balochistan, the country’s fruit basket province, which produces more than 90% of the fruit in Pakistan.
The solar-powered irrigation boom is “good for the environment because it's clean energy,” Muhammad Kazim Pirzada, the irrigation minister of Punjab, told Reuters.
“But at the same time, it is also impacting our water table,” the minister added.
The underground water levels are depleting, according to reports by the Punjab water authorities reviewed by Reuters. The documents, however, did not pinpoint reasons for the falling water table levels.
Earlier this year, Pakistan’s Power Minister, Awais Leghari, told Reuters that it is a “misconception that solar tube wells are depleting groundwater.”
Some experts disagree, while the water department in Punjab continues to study whether tube wells are depleting groundwater.
Pakistan needs measures to map the tube wells and monitor groundwater levels and withdrawals, to avoid what could be a major water crisis, analysts tell Reuters.
Pakistan is a water-stressed country, and its water supply situation may further worsen. Earlier this year, rising tensions with India led to New Delhi threatening to suspend the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), a vital water treaty between the two rivals mediated by the World Bank, to share water resources from the Indus River basin downstream to Pakistan.
Climate change and population growth are also stressing water resources in Pakistan. Many people do not have access to clean water. Depletion of groundwater would be devastating to a country with a rapidly growing population, as potentially falling crop yields due to water shortages could also lead to food scarcity.
Solar-powered irrigation could also contribute to the water stress of Pakistan, according to a study published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Research earlier this year.
The paper by researchers from the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council and the Wageningen University in the Netherlands studied the effect of the ongoing transition from diesel to solar power for irrigation. The authors noted that farmers using solar pumps typically extract more groundwater compared to farmers using diesel pumps under similar conditions. While solar-powered tube well pumps have environmental and economic benefits, they could cause over-extraction of groundwater, the study found.
The authors of the paper conducted one-to-one comparisons of solar vs diesel pumps in 30 pairs of farmers working in similar circumstances. The researchers found that in 77% of the cases, farms using solar pumps extracted more water than their diesel counterparts under comparable conditions.
The up-scaling of solar pumps could deplete groundwater aquifers and have drastic implications for future sustainable food production in Pakistan, the authors of the study wrote.
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By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com