The market-based water conservation generally refers to using the incentive principle for encouraging farmers to practice less water consuming agriculture. Incentives can entail drawing on the economic value of water to induce farmers to adopt conservation measures. Few experiences of irrigation water pricing have been carried out worldwide with varying indicators of success. However, the Egyptian Government’s attitude against irrigation water pricing is supported by several technical reasons, including:

• The generally small ownership of agricultural land in the Nile Valley and Delta, which renders the issue of metering water supplies to a large number of small farms rather impractical.
• It is not expected that the high overall efficiency of the Nile irrigation system will be significantly improved as a result of water pricing. This is due to the fact that most water that is lost via canal/drain seepage or from irrigation application onto agriculture fields replenishes the underlying closed aquifer, and can subsequently be retrieved by pumping devices. Moreover, water drained from agricultural lands in the Nile Valley is routed back into downstream reaches of the Nile.

Water pricing will have insignificant impact in parts of the Nile catchments where soil has a physical structure that allows the cultivation of specific crops only, thus decreasing the opportunity to consider alternative cropping decisions.