The Study Of The Price Of Irrigation Water Based On The Cost-benefit Analysis In Hebei Plain

Water resources are not only the fundamental natural resources and strategic economic resources of human survival and development, but also the most precious natural resources in the world. With the growth of the population and the rapid development of social economy, the water demand of agriculture, industry and city is sharply increased. Water crisis have become a global major problem in the 21 st century, and have brought powerful challenge to sustainable utilization of water resource for human beings. Agriculture is the basic industry in our country which consumes the most water resources. At present, most of the irrigated systems are imperfect, such as extensive management of water resource, low water price, waste and pollution of water and so on. And people began to realize that effective means must be taken to allocate and use water resources. Therefore, agricultural water price policy is undoubtedly an effective way to solve those problems.According to the research and experience at home and abroad, for the main problems of agricultural irrigation, this paper set an agricultural irrigation water pr ice model with the methods of cobb-douglas production model, data envelopment analysis model and cost-benefit method and the basic theories of cost theory, demand theory and profit maximization theory, and discussed the subsidy policy when the water price was changed. The principle of water price setting includes fairness and equality, cost and profit compensation, water price subsidies, as well as sustainable development. The results show that:(1)According to the result of cobb-douglas production function, the food production was in a stage of scale diminishing returns in Hebei plain in 2013. The input had already saturated at this time and place. Pure technical efficiency, scale efficiency and technical efficiency were invalid, and there’s some room to improve the food production efficiency. The input of irrigation volume, fertilizer and machinery was redundant while there’s some room to improve the food production. We could reduce the cost and improve the capacity to produce by optimizing the input mode, and reduce the risk of groundwater overdraft and water pollution which was caused by excessive irrigation and fertilization.(2) According to the principle of profit maximization, this paper set the agricultural irrigation water price model by analyzing the cost, demand and water production function. We eventually got the agricultural irrigation water price which was 0.34 yuan /m3 with the survey and statistics data in 2013 in Hebei plain.(3) Hebei’s provincial government had already set corresponding policy to promote the reform of agricultural irrigation water price and water saving while ignored the income of farmers. Therefore, this research considered farmers income namely food subsidies to provide reference for perfecting the agricultural subsidy policy. Two cases of the subsidy policy: First, for the present earnings of the farmers, if we remain the irrigation volume, yield and income, the government should provide an allowance of 616.58 yuan per hectare that is to provide0.09 yuan per kilogram to farmers. Second, for the per capita annual net income of rural households, considering the actual production, the government should provide an allowance of 10548.67 yuan per hectare namely 1.46 yuan per kilogram to farmers.