Impacts of Agricultural Water Quota Policy in Groundwater Resources Management in Qorveh-Dehgolan Plain

Abstract The existence of water scarcity problems in current decades at most of countries leads to take new policies regarding water demand management instead of water supply management. Therefore, the current study attempted to investigate the effects of irrigation water quota on cropping pattern and gross margin in Qorveh–Dehgolan aquifer. The positive mathematical programming (PMP) and production function with constant elasticity of substitution (CES) was used to analyze data. The necessary data was collected through fill questionnaires for the agricultural year 2015-16 and stratified random sampling used to select samples. The results showed that, applying the policy of irrigation water quota (under scenarios of 10 to 40 per cent respect to base year) would lead to reduce the level of crop land's products with high water requirement such as alfa-alfa and potato crops and it would lead to increase the level of cropland of products with lower water requirement such as wheat and barley crops and thus reducing the level of cropland as a whole. And again the results showed that, application of the policy cause of increase of water productivity but decrease of gross revenue.