| The purpose of this study was to develop a model that can allocate water between users of different areas in a large-scale irrigation project. The objective function of such a model consists of maximizing the net benefit of the project, subject to a number of constraints depending on the context.;The Senegal River Basin Project, a multipurpose and multicountry water resource project that is being developed by Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal in West Africa, was used as a study case to exemplify the allocation process. On this project, the problem consisted of allocating water among five geographical zones within an irrigation program along the Senegal River over 50 years was subject to land and labor force availability and the irrigation development rate applied by Mali's government. Production was governed by the crop production function developed by Hargreaves. Typical cropping patterns, water requirements, and costs were estimated from the data for each individual zone.;GAMS software was used to develop two nonlinear models, depending on the constraints taken into account. The outputs of models claim that water allocation should favor the most valuable crops, such as potatoes and other vegetables; and the maximum net benefit does not necessarily correspond to the maximum crop production. In fact, the model sorts the zones by order of most attractive to the least attractive zones, which also indicates the order of priority in development. (Abstract shortened by UMI.). |
