Studies On The Formation And Allocation Of Drainage Basin Water Resources Property Rights And Its Application To Agriculture

In 1994, Lester Brown raised a viewpoint of worldwide importance as 'Who will feed China'on journal World Watch (9-10/1994), which significantly activated studies in China on the sustainable development proposed by the global leaders conference in 1992. However, one of major approaches along this way is to spread the concerns of agricultural sustainability towards the water resources sustainability. Obviously, due to the apparent importance of surface runoff to water resources in general, the sustainability of water resources can be naturally converted as the drainage basin sustainability. Combined the technological background above with the economic mechanism 'marketing allocation of resources', the paper took the drainage basin as the convenient boundary for analysis, and by the way, focused the discussions of the topic on the formation and allocation of basin water resources property rights (BWRPR) and application of the main achievements to the allocation of BWRPR in agriculture. 1. Complete-category of drainage basin water resources (DBWR). In hydrology,drainage basin is a natural region that bears the water resources as the core resource. DBWR can be in one of three different states, gaseous, liquid and solid water. With spatial distribution, it can exist as atmospheric water, surface water, and underground water resources. As regards the fluidity of DBWR, apparently, the atmospheric water is easy to disappear from a targeted basin, the surface water is usually fluid, and both the glacier and underground water, especially the deep underground one, are almost equal to solid water. All above forms of waters in a basin consists of the complete-category of DBWR. 2. Property rights and water resources property rights (WRPR). Property right is one of key tools in institutional economic studies. Modern property right theory is closely targeted on the analysis of the resources allocation efficiency. WRPR, of course, is bound to the study of the allocation efficiency of WRPR. Based on such fundamental conceptual tools, the paper defined a new category of WRPR named as Conjunctive property right, which is a kind of WRPR due to the conjunctive existence of some water to some other resource(s) possessed by someone. 3. Drainage basin water property rights and their allocation. Firstly, water resources and basin water resources, water rights and DBWRPRs lie in different scopes. Drainage basin water resources are the special existing forms of general water resources. Similarly, DBWRPRs are the special forms of the general water property rights. Secondly, DBWR distribution has two forms: 1) natural cycle, which consists of the natural distribution way of DBWR, and determines the existing form of DBWR in a basin; 2) human intervened water cycle, which can be administrative, economic or/and legal approaches. Allocation system of DBWRPRs is the way to allocate DBWRPRs among the different owners of water rights according to some rules. 4. Agricultural water resources property rights and its allocation. Finally, the knowledge gained with discussion above was applied to formulate the mechanism and status quo of Heihe DBWPR allocation. The results showed that there are both progress people have achieved and some problems need to be solved in the near future: On the one hand, Heihe DBWPR allocation, by the water-taking right, water-use right and is allocated through the regulated, and through the water-right card, agricultural water right is allocated by market allocation approach simultaneously, which represents the advancement of water--right innovation. For another hand, with the sustainable development background, there are still issues as following: 1) Heihe basin water rights allocation is limited to the surface runoff and underground water, and the study of atmospheric water allocation is out-of-the-way, which is one of the foreground research area; 2) agricultural water rights allocation indicates a convention that Heihe basin economy depends on heavily irrigated agriculture. But, owing to the urbanization and industrialization,basin sustainable development will constrain the water—allocation proportion between agriculture and non-agriculture industry; 3) The low efficiency of agricultural water right is from low using—efficiency of soil water, plant transpiration is a process to dissipate easily, and with the soil's limit capacity, which make a abundant of the scarce liquid water be evaporated even wasted. Therefore, from above analysis, it is suggested that Heihe basin sustainable development depend upon such two oriented aspect in a long view: 1) to get the new deploitation of water resources form, especially to develop atmospheric source and farthest to make use it; 2) to get rid of depending on soil—water deposition and transpiration, which improves efficiency of using-water and water--right allocation consequently, and achieves the sustainable development of irrigated-agriculture.