Agricultural Irrigation Water Price Determined And Its Impact On Farmers’ Behavior

Water is a basic natural resources and strategic economic resource, with the populationgrowth and socio-economic development, water scarcity has gradually changed and becomean important economic growth constraints. Agriculture is the basic industry of our country,but also the water users. In recent years, the Chinese government has taken include increasingthe water supply as well as financial subsidies, including a variety of ways to resolve theseconflicts. However, with the accelerated process of marketization and rising supply costs andincrease the water supply has been unable to meet the total way of inefficient use of waterresources and damage to the environment. People began to realize that you must take a moreeffective mechanism to configure and use of existing water resources. In this context,agricultural water pricing policy is undoubtedly an effective way to solve the water problemsof irrigation.In this paper, drawing on research experience at home and abroad on the basis of themain problems for the irrigation of agricultural, select Jinghuiqu Irrigation in ShaanxiProvince as an example, using the theory of supply and demand economics and cost-benefitapproach, the reasonable value of agricultural irrigation water pricing and the impact of tariffchanges on household behavior were studied.The results show that a balanced tariff Jinghuiqu Irrigation under existing irrigationmode is0.27RMB/m3, than the standard price of water in the area of high practicalimplementation. When the price of water is rising, farmers will not only reduce their irrigationwater, but also to take more efficient irrigation mode, in order to achieve its goal of profitmaximization. By extending the study of existing irrigation mode, the paper also obtainedunder different irrigation modes farmers could bear the price of water, the results show thatthe price of water irrigated currently running standard (0.170RMB/m3) of water-savingbehavior of households cannot resulting in an effective constraint, the existing irrigation mode,the limit price of water saving technologies and irrigation wells canal dual mode were0.510RMB/m3,0.657RMB/m3and0.782RMB/m3. Farmers tariff affordability (0.621RMB/m3)makes it the choice of these three modes of irrigation initiative to select only the first two, thatis, water-saving irrigation technology adoption is under the influence of water pricing policyspontaneously to complete, and the choice mode channel irrigation wells beyond the farmer can afford. In this case, changing irrigation patterns government subsidies need to be guidedby the way.