Impacts of Agricultural Water Quota Policy in Groundwater Management in Qorveh-Dehgolan plain

The appearance of water scarcity problems in current decades at most pf countries leads to take new policies regarding water demand management instead of water demand supply. Therefore, the current study attempted to investigate the effects of irrigation water quota on cultivation pattern and gross margin in Qorveh–Dehgolan aquifer. The positive mathematical programming (PMP) and production function with constant elasticity of substitution (CES) was used to analyze data. The necessary data was collected through a stratified random sampling and fill questionnaires for the agricultural year 2015-16. The results showed that, applying the policy of irrigation water quota (under scenarios of 10 to 40 per cent respect to base year) would lead to reduce the level of cropland of products with high water requirement such as alfa-alfa and potato crops and it would lead to increase the level of cropland of products with lower water requirement such as wheat and barley crops and thus reducing the level of cropland as a whole. And again the results showed that, application of the policy cause of increase of water productivity but decrease of gross revenue.