ABSTRACT
This book “Integrated Watershed Management in Rainfed Agriculture’’ is about poverty, the environment, agriculture, and rural business in the semi-arid tropics (SAT) of developing countries. It tells about an approach to rural development, the watershed approach, which has proven particularly successful and which deserves wide international application in pursuit of the various Millenium Goals. The approach deploys our current understanding of the social and technical features of the rural SAT and seeks a true partnership with villagers, drawing together ideas and knowledge from the outside to complement their skills and knowledge. The approach gradually builds up awareness and confidence and creates local institutions so as to enable the villagers to change their lives markedly for the better. It recognizes that success requires the poor and disadvantaged to be intimately involved in the development effort and seeks to evolve a diverse economy in the village, albeit with a largely agricultural starting point. It uses the physical boundary of a watershed because this permits the rational harnessing, storage, and use of water, without which there can be but little progress in these predominantly rainfed environments.
