ABSTRACT
Most (about 70 percent) of the freshwater we take from nature goes to irrigated agriculture, so we are right to ask what we are getting in exchange, which leads to the question of what benefits we want from agriculture. Fortunately, agriculture is multifunctional, so we can derive a range of benefits, corresponding to all five value categories (environmental, economic, social, cultural, and governance) presented in Chapter 1. But what kind of agriculture will deliver the mix of benefits that we prefer? To answer this question, we need to know our own values, and we also need to know what values we can reasonably expect from particular agricultural policies. The development of large scale irrigation systems in the developing world came with an imposition of engineering values serving the interests of agribusiness, whereas the emerging values of sustainability would seem to favor the small, diversified farming systems of agroecology, now being promoted by FAO.
