Hey y’all Pete here. In Pakistan they use the Moslem water principles at the local level in order to allocate and distribute water to agricultural users. They still use the British Canal and Drainage Act of 1873 as a rule of law when it comes to the governmental level, where water management is a provincial matter, in three of the four provinces. This is one of the world’s oldest and largest irrigation systems and it has been suffering from decay for the past 50-80 years. Salinity is damaging crop production to thousands of acres of land every year. The main problem they have is at the farm level there is improper management and also lack of coordination between the provinces.

If I could rewind time, traveling back to the past to advise Middle Eastern leaders about water resources, here is what I would advise them to do. I would tell them that they need to create a better administrative system which would be comprised of tribunals of irrigators in each irrigation community, like that of Valencia, Spain. This would help to narrow and pinpoint the decision making when it came to deciding on what should be done about water allocation and distribution. The meetings and decisions of these tribunals should be public and verbal, with the decisions being made being written down and recorded in a record book. This would make the system simple and equal. The problem of inequality and social classes battling against the actual people who need the irrigation would almost cease to exist and the change would help to prevent it from happening in the future. I would keep the water structures, such as the qanats and waterways, the same because they already go to where they need to, but I would add some norias, or water wheels, along with more tanks so that when a drought came, some water would be stored for future use.

I believe these leaders would think that these ideas would be worth implementing because they are simple, they bring more equality to the irrigation community, which would result in greater efficiency and production, and it would create a much better system since the people who use the water would actually be in charge of it. They know how much water they need and how to disperse it across the land better than the ruling elite, so it makes a lot of sense to hand them the power that they deserve.

The first piece of information that I would need from the past in order to write a formal research paper about my recommendations is who the exact ruler(s) were during the time period that I choose. The second piece of information that I would need is what time period I would be researching. The third piece of information that I would need is some of the actual laws that were written and implemented during that time period and by those rulers. I would look for this information on the past either a) the Academic Search Premier, b) Albertson’s or Boise Public Library, or c) A credible internet source such as an article that is scholarly or peer-reviewed.

Pete