Socioeconomic Modeling for Water Resource Planning: Optimizing Crop Distribution in the Bolivian Andes under Hydrologic and Social Constraints
Abstract
After decades of decline, agricultural production is increasing again as a share of the GDP in Bolivia. As the 6th poorest country by GDP per capita in Latin America and the Caribbean, Bolivia is the focus of many water resources and agricultural improvement projects to improve living conditions for the most impoverished. In the Andes mountains surrounding La Paz, the implementation of irrigation projects to improve crop productivity have led to a renewed interest in hydro-social analysis for socioeconomic improvements. Using hydrological outputs from the Water Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) hydrologic model built for the Upper La Paz River Watershed Master Plan, this study develops a socioeconomic model to optimize crop areas in four municipalities surrounding the Bolivian capital. The model uses amounts of area and water available for irrigation as constraints, data for prices of agricultural products, input costs, and estimates of farm labor by crop type to optimize crop areas. We compare optimal crop areas when using four distinct objective functions: water used, regional net income, regional jobs created, and nutrition of producer communities to understand the trade-off implications of prioritizing water supply versus other considerations on crop decisions. Differences in the water use, labor required, and economic costs by crop type lead to different crops gaining prominence depending on the priority objective. These types of models can help decision makers to provide subsidies or quotas for certain crops, among other agricultural and water infrastructure policies, depending on a diversity of needs within communities.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFM.H42M1460M