The return of the water - IUCN

The Return of the Water
27 and 30 bags, which equals an average of 2.3 tonnes per ha. An average of 49% of households
will actually cultivate new rice. Using floodplain farm gate prices, production costs (labour and
other inputs) were deducted to give a net value for flood-related rice production.
Roof thatching, fish baskets
Houses in floodplain villages are re-thatched every two years, with an average of 5 houses per
compound using an estimated 400 bundles of grass. The costs of replacing grass obtained from
flooded areas around villages with purchased grass, less harvesting costs, were used to estimate the
net value of thatching grass. Approximately 70% of households were engaged in fishing, using an
average of 130 baskets and traps each, which have a lifetime of 2 years. The market price of fishing
baskets and traps, less the costs of labour to harvest grass and construct baskets, had been used to
estimate the net value of grass used for fishing baskets.
Bee keeping
After the pilot flood release, 20 households took up bee keeping as a result of the increased availability
of water and pollen-producing vegetation. It was predicted that an additional 80 households would
take up bee keeping under re-inundation Option X, 50 under Option Y, and 20 under Option Z. Bee
keeping in the floodplain produces an average of 20 litres of honey a year, sold at € 3 per litre.
Annual costs were deducted from this figure in order to estimate the net economic benefit of bee
keeping for honey production.
Water points
The drying out of the floodplain resulted in the loss of waterholes in the Waza National Park
(Wesseling et al., 1994). These had to be dug again and filled from a borehole. The benefits of reinundation
in terms of avoided expenditures to mitigate the effects of loss of naturally fed waterholes
were calculated from the costs of installing and maintaining waterholes. This included the costs of
sinking a borehole, and of filling and maintaining the nine waterholes that had been affected by the
loss of flooding.
The loss of dry-season and permanent water sources for domestic use was valued by looking at the
mitigative expenditures of digging two additional wells to provide water. As wells must be re-dug
once a year, these costs represent mitigative expenditures that can be avoided by re-inundation.
Additional water available for livestock production was not valued separately, so as to avoid double
counting with the figures calculated for the value of dry-season pasture.
Transport
The pilot release re-enabled water transport along parts of the Petit Guruma and Logomatya that
had previously been closed off or made shallower as a result of flood reduction. After the pilot
releases three boats made a total of about 60 trips during the flood season using these re-opened
routes, carrying between 8 and 72 passengers on each trip as well as a variety of livestock and other
goods. Water transport possibilities were assumed to stay the same for all re-inundation options,
and were valued by deducting boat operation costs (fuel, labour, equipment, and depreciation) from
total income earned from fares.
Costs of implementing re-inundation measures
Detailed costs had been provided in the proposal for re-inundation (IUCN, 1999b) for each of options
X, Y and Z. These included the capital and maintenance cost of flood release infrastructure; associated
preparation, design and planning costs; monitoring, training and research; and expenditures on work
to mitigate negative health impacts of flood release. This study took these estimates as the direct
costs of implementing re-inundation measures in the floodplain.
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