Agricultural water productivity and food pattern of Iranians

Introduction: Among irrigation management indicators, some researchers still believe that the most important indicator is water productivity, but there are still researchers who are strongly opposed to this indicator and in their opinion, this indicator is not a suitable and acceptable indicator because it is used with the concept of two keywords. and consumption are seriously different. According to them, further use is recycling and it remains in the same liquid state, but consumption means getting out of reach and transforming. About 50 years ago, we did not see a food called spaghetti in Iran, and it is more than the age of tomatoes and potatoes in Iran. It has not been 70 to 80 years. Few Iranians had eaten pizza or hamburger until about 50 years ago. There were no chips and puffs in Iran, and the daily food of Iranians was more or less healthy and nutritious local foods such as broth, various soups and cucumber broth, etc. In few houses, rice was cooked more than once or twice a week. This introduction was said to remind that the food pattern is changeable. Well, it can change, but it changes slowly and gradually.
Materials and methods: In order to better choose the measuring criteria and to be able to compare Iran's water productivity with the global water productivity, the measuring criteria were chosen in such a way that they were considered with the global average values, in other words, if the ratio of Iran to If the world is between 0.9 and 1.1, Iran's water productivity is the same as the world values. If it is 20% more than the global average, Iran's water efficiency is very good, and similarly if it is less than 70%, the water efficiency is very low and the conditions are unfavorable.
Results: It seems that the food pattern should gradually lean towards products that consume less water. For example, if one kilo of beans uses less water than one kilo of peas, and the nutritional value of the two can be considered more or less the same. As a result, it is preferred to use beans, which actually saves some water. In this research, three issues will be discussed and investigated, including: general indicators of important irrigation management indicators, the state of water productivity in agricultural and garden plants in Iran compared to the global average, and finally, some important strategies for improving water efficiency will be stated. The results showed that based on the classification of plants based on the ratio of Iran's average productivity compared to the world average productivity, it is very good for barley and beans, but very low for wheat and peas.
Conclusion: general ways to increase water productivity are achieved by increasing performance or reducing water consumption. There are two methods to increase crop yield, including crop and breed. The agricultural method includes proper tillage, timely cultivation, timely irrigation - to the extent of sufficiency, and optimal use of production inputs and the use of appropriate tools, etc. The racially method includes the management of living environmental factors including pests and diseases and the management of non-living environmental factors including non-living stresses such as salinity stress, water stress, temperature stress and specific stress, etc. It is aimed at plants. Also, there are many ways to reduce water consumption, including paying attention to rain-fed cultivation, supplemental irrigation, low irrigation in non-sensitive periods of the plant, planting, conservation agriculture, changing the cultivation time, using mulch, using hydro-flume pipes, etc. Two policies should be seriously implemented in the country in the shortest possible time, firstly increasing the crop yield instead of increasing the area under cultivation and secondly the food pattern should be slowly changed according to the agricultural water productivity, otherwise the country's water problems will be unsolvable.