Progress Report 2004

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Agriculture, Irrigation and Forestry Programme

The work of the Agriculture, Irrigation and Forestry Programme's (AIFP) Watershed Component centres on ensuring that sound watershed management will maintain the functions of watersheds for the future. It also looks at how the management of these watersheds can interact positively with the development of tourism and recreation sectors, fisheries development, and flood management efforts.

Over the past year the Watershed Component has engaged in research on the best methods for monitoring land-use changes, which included the acquisition and analysis of geographic information system (GIS) and satellite images of the basin through cooperation with the Canadian Space Agency. Important baseline studies on watershed management, forestry and land use planning have also been completed.

National Working Groups on watershed management were established in each of the riparian countries and one pilot watershed was selected in each.

Other achievements in 2004 included:

• Organising a "Quality Management Circle" for MRC top management to develop and understand the needs for capacity building and managing changes for MRC networks in the field of watershed management. This also provided the participants with an understanding of the envisaged training concept and programme for staff and partners involved in watershed management activities which will take place over the next few years.
• Hosting of the First Policy Dialogue Meeting on Watershed Management in Vientiane with representatives from the four MRC member countries together with German International Cooperation agencies GTZ and INWENT and representatives from many international organisations and NGOs. This meeting provided a forum for the countries to discuss the status of their watershed management.
• The establishment of a library of watershed management related documents, which will later beintegrated into the MRC Document Management System.
• The establishment of research cooperation with German and US universities.
• A joint training programme for watershed management planners in the four countries.

As a sub-component of AIFP, the activities of the Programme to Develop the Multi-functionality of Paddy Fields over the Lower Mekong Basin to collect data on rice farming and water use for modelling some functions of paddy fields have been continued.

At the beginning of 2004 a series of national meetings and a field survey were conducted to establish the best practical methods to collect relevant data, and member countries started data collection by the first quarter. In May 2004 the countries made presentations of their working methods at the second regional workshop held in Udon Thani, Thailand.

Later in the year the countries submitted the collected data on seasonal changes in rice planting areas at a district level and this was used to construct a temporary GIS dataset illustrating basinwide information on rice planting areas and growing periods. However, further input is required to complete other datasets, such as irrigation water use. Improvement of the rice farming dataset and paddy field map is ongoing.

On-farm experiments to check water balances and some related phenomena in paddy fields in selected spots will continue until the first quarter of 2005.