 Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. We know people are joining us from all different parts of the world and we really appreciate you being here with us. I would like to welcome you back to our Water Productivity Masterclass series brought to you by the Water Pip Project. We are in week four of six and we really appreciate those who have joined us so far for weeks one, two, and three. And if you're new, we also welcome you and hope you enjoy the webinar this week. I am Lauren Zalinski. I'm from IHE Delft working on the Water Pip Project. And I'm joined by Abraham Abishek from Mehta-Meta and we will be moderating this webinar today. So for those who are new, the Water Pip Project stands for Water Productivity Improvement in Practice. And it's a project that is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the goal of improving water productivity in the agricultural sector. So we are bringing together groups that focus on water science and water management for most of our activities. And these activities are being led by IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, vacuuming in university research, and Mehta-Meta Research and Communication. So we really appreciate you all being here and we would like to know more about you. So if you could introduce yourself in the chat and put your name, the organization you work for, and the country. We're really interested to see where you all come from. And if you have been here before, you'll know that all of the participants will be on mute, but we encourage you to engage with us in the chat box. If you have comments or questions during the webinar, please put them in the chat and we will collect them for the Q&A session at the end. So again, we are on week four of six. So our first webinar focused on introducing the content of water productivity and how to monitor it. Weeks two and three, we focused on using the Wapour portal for monitoring water productivity. And now we are focusing on a specific crop and with some case studies in Africa. So we're focusing on sugarcane production and water productivity issues around sugarcane production. Next week, we will learn about factors, socioeconomic factors around water productivity. And our final week, we will be using Aquacrop to monitor water productivity, which is another open software from FAO. And if you would like to re-watch the webinar from today and download the presentations or find additional information, you can always go to the project website. So that is waterpip.un-ihe.org, or you can go to the waterchannel.tv and you'll be able to find information from there. Or if you would like to see the information from the previous week, you can also see that information there as well. So please share it with colleagues who might have been unable to attend and we're happy to answer questions as well through the website. So the agenda today is quite full. We have many colleagues joining us. So first, we will show a recorded interview from our colleague in the field, Avarajirma, and he's going to talk about the experience of producing sugarcane ethiopia. Next, we will hear from our colleague, Taya Alamayadu, who will talk from the sugar industry perspective about different priorities, opportunities, and challenges. Next, we'll be Professor Peter Wanderzach from IHE Delft, and he will look at the implication of sugarcane expansion and river basin context. Next, we'll be Abebe Tukala, also from IHE Delft, who will discuss intensification versus expansion in sugarcane production. And then our colleague from Seth Sanderhav Martin van der Stuken will talk about sugar beets. We'll start with a short video about sugar beet breeding, and then he will go into more detail about how sugar beets can help us with sustainable agriculture. And again, at the end, Abraham and I will moderate a question and answer session. So we will not pause in between the presentations, but if you have a question, please put it in the chat. Abraham and I will collect them, and we will put them on the screen during the Q&A session and have our expert panel have a discussion about them. So I think with that, I'm going to quickly introduce the first video. So we'll be hearing from Avarajirma, who is a Civil and Irrigation Works Division Manager at the Wongi Shoah Sugar Factory in Ethiopia, and he's going to talk about his experiences from the field. The interview was done by our colleague Yusef Sharonet, who is a Mehta Mehta colleague in Ethiopia, so a big thank you to him for doing this for us. And please note that we did have to shorten the interview a little bit to fit in the time with our webinar, but if you would like to watch the full video, it will be available on the waterchannel.tv as well as the project's website. So I think with that, we can start the video. Okay, my name is Avarajirma. I am working in Wongi Shoah Sugar Factory in the position of Civil and Irrigation Works Division Manager. I am working here from junior level to senior management level for the last 20 years. The new factory capacity is double of the old two-factory. It is 6,000 tons per day, can crashing capacity. Regarding the sugar cane, annually, the sugar factory has a capacity to produce 1 million quintal of white sugar. But now, from year to year, we are planning 1 million quintal of sugar per year. We cannot meet the target. For example, in this year, we are producing 6,635,000 quintal of sugar. It is almost 80% of our target. Last year is also similar. Last year, before last year, it is similar. So our target is lay in 17 to 80% of target. We cannot still meet 100% of our target. This new development has very great impact on our development. In phase two, velocity and BOFA area is planned. Somewhat, we are in progress to construct a irrigation infrastructure. But due to very social, political and other problems, we cannot meet that project accordingly. That project also affects our target. As a big in sugar corporation, also plan to obtain new sugar factor, both agricultural and factory. That also has a great impact on our target. In the way that there is a very great financial problem due to that financial problem, we are not able to purchase the required resources like fertilizer, herbicide and other input materials according to our squeeze. Due to that, our productivity of cane is reduced. Then finally, it affects our target. Both within the company and within the sugar company, expansion project affects our target. According to the irrigation network, there are three categories. The first one is the fellow irrigated land which is owned by the state proper. The other one is pressurized irrigation system which is owned by outgrowth farmer association. The third one is hydro flue irrigation infrastructure. It's also owned by the outgrowth farm. There are five soil classes, five soil classes. According to the five soil classes, throttling also different, fertilizer application also different. For example, the A1 soil category which is black cotton soil. The first planting is harvested after two years. Then the first throttling after one years. Then the second rattan after two years. The third rattan after one years. Then after that, it's uprooted and the land is remaining as it is for four months. After four months, the land preparation activity is started. Then new planting is continued. So in A1, one planting season is five, six years. Planting two years, first rattan one years, second rattan two years, third rattan one years. So it's continued for six years. After six years, the sugar cane is uprooted and ready for the new planting activities. In A2, it is for eight years. Then the light C1 soil cycle, it remains for 10 years. After 10 years, new planting activity is conducted. The major difference is due to fertility of soil. So the state-owned farm is, its fertility is very low. It needs more application of fertilizer. The world city one is, the soil type is very fertile. But as previously mentioned, we are put the same type of, the same type and amount of fertilizer is applied in the state-owned farm and also all the city. This is the main difference for land productivity. The second one is the system by itself makes the difference. In cultural practice, especially in application of water, in state-owned farm, we cannot manage the water application. It is similar to flooding. But the second one is it is more manageable because it is more technology system is applied. The world city also somewhat better than the state-owned. It is hydrofoil. We cannot, we can manage better. This one also make a difference for the land productivity. In the state-owned farmers, the company by itself arrange a rehabilitation project to rehabilitate the whole system. The irrigation, the mechanization, every system arranges the rehabilitation project. That rehabilitation project reduces or increases the land productivity by a certain amount. But we cannot continue that rehabilitation year to year. We are stopping that rehabilitation project at some period. So the problem is now also continue. That is one measure taken by the company to reduce the problem. The second one is our division also try to make some measures to reduce these problems. For example, we are trying to measure the amount of water entered to the fields. It also makes some differences but we cannot meet our target. We are trying to line canals. By another word, we are trying to change earthen canals to concrete canals to minimize the seepage losses and also earthen canals to hydroflu. But this also makes some difference that we cannot make now the target. So we are trying to make some measures in state-owned farms. Fertilizer application, we must upgrade your fertilizer application, your fertilizer application, your water application. So the recommendation of the company is to improve our cultural practice. But still we cannot improve our cultural practice due to different reasons. In our state-owned farmers water, the drainage of the farm by itself is shifted up. So we are trying to upgrade our drainage facilities. That is our target. Also we are conducting that activities but our plan and our activity is not matched. We are not doing according to our plan due to financial problem. So we cannot elevate the problem 100%. By another word, we try to give parasitamol to our fields. The problem is continuing, the problem is continuing with ours. Also we are trying to improve by developing HX list to follow up the cultural practice. At a certain time we are stopping following according to the checklist. In our opinion, the center pivot irrigation system is more productive than the other one. Because the center pivot irrigation system is less affected by humane. A uniform distribution of water is applied in the sugar cane. So this center pivot irrigation system is more productive than the other irrigation system. Operational maintenance costs are different in different irrigation systems. For example, in center pivot irrigation systems, one person can manage one center pivot. In other words, one center pivot means 75 hectares. So one person can manage 75 hectares for 8 hours. In furrow irrigation systems, 1.2 hectares is managed per day per 3%. Look the difference. There is a great difference. That 3% one day, but one day 75 hectares, one person. This is operational. In regarding to spare part, the center pivot irrigation system needs almost zero spare part. The only one, maybe in 2 or 1 month after the tire is reduced, we fill the air. Regarding to the drugline, we broken the sprinkler aid. We are trying to exchange the hose. There is very difficult to manage in drugline sprinkler. And also we are investing many foreign birds to purchase that infield material. So the center pivot irrigation system, operational and maintenance cost is minimum than the drugline irrigation systems. Operational cost of furrow is very high than the drugline and the center pivot irrigation systems. Regarding the water application, there is no any difference in any irrigation systems. Let's come to this state on the systems. We can apply the water timely and required amount and also in a plagiarized irrigation systems. The only problem one is application of this availability of electricity. In plagiarized irrigation systems, mostly electricity are not available from the EBCO side. Due to that, due to that problem, we are not applying amount of water at a required time. But the state-owned one is we cannot, we can apply the amount of water as required. There is sufficient amount of water in our, for our, our company. We can get sufficient amount of water. But certain months, May and June, especially May, we face a shortage of water, a shortage of water. Otherwise, we can get sufficient amount of water for the, our farmers. For expansion one, expansion one, we are not, we are not have sufficient amount of water for expansion one for. But the constructed, the existing farmers, we can assure a sufficient amount of water from our. We have one, one weathering station in our state farmers. We are measuring temperature, both maximum and minimum, wind speed, humidity, relative humidity and sunshine hours per day. But the problem is, we cannot use this status for irrigation scheduling. We are, now we are trying to use the weathering data per three months. How, how, how, what about our irrigation efficiency? We are using the irrigation, the pump or the amount of water according to the weathering data. So, day to day activity, we are not translate the data accordingly. That is the major problem. Regarding to this weather measuring activities, we are trying to measure the discharge amount of water from our river only. In a stand on the, in a stand on the farmers, we are measuring the amount of water that is discharged from ours. And also the data is similar, but it is also similar, water quality also similar. So we are trying to compare, trying to compare, within a three months period, this amount of water. Are you applying the water according to the weather or not? We are only compare this amount. Most probably the state owned farm is use more waters than the required one. The other farmers are lesser amount of water is used than the required one. So we are measuring only at the input side, at the beginning side. We are not trying to measure the water within the state. We are not trying. Our company, basically regarding to this water, there are very challenging. We are very challenging because starting from the, the assumption for the value to give water is very less. That value, that assumption makes our effort less. Simply this water is coming from somewhere pass through our fields. We are trying to pump from that one. So it is a plenty. It assumes it is a plenty resource. We can, we can, we cannot, we can use according to our desire. This is assumption. But if we give, we give the value to that water resource. If you give the value to water resource, we are trying to create some measuring structures, some means to improve that amount of water. Simply the first one, the cost is very minimum. So we can pay for any amount of water. We are discharging many amount of water from our river. That amount of water is not using for sugar cane. It also loss through slippage, loss through misuse of human person. We are also paying because due to its payment is less, we are paying. So if we are paying the assumption is we can use any amount of water. So this is a very challenging problem. That is why we are not plan to measure our water productivity. This is one challenging in our company. So I would like to thank Obero Jirma for sharing his thoughts and his experiences on sugar cane production in the field. As, as we all know, it's very complicated to run big estates like that. And there's many considerations that go into it. And he makes lots of connections between the physical conditions, so the soils and natural rainfall, the operations and maintenance of the infrastructure. So I would like to thank Obero Jirma for sharing his thoughts and his experiences around the different types of irrigation, but then also the motivation around the economics of water. But it goes to show that having more information about how to increase efficiencies could also help reduce some of the complexity around managing such a, such a system. So big thank you again to Obero and then also our colleague Yusef for recording that interview. The entire interview, again, you can see it on the Waterpip website or thewaterchannel.tv. So now we will move on from the field to the sugar industry perspective. So Dr. Taya Alameyehu will talk to us about this in his presentation. You may not see him on the video due to the internet connection, but we're very excited to have him here. So thank you, doctor. Hi, Taya. You could begin your presentation now. Taya, do you see your... Looks like you might have been disconnected. Oh, he's back. Okay. Taya, can you hear us? Are you ready to start? I thought you could you begin if you see your presentation? Or let us know if you don't see it. Looks like we're having a little bit of technical difficulties, but I think until we get Taya back, Siman Shavalki will start the presentation. And then when we get Taya back, you can jump in again. And then I think we're having a little trouble with your microphone. Well, Abraham, maybe what we can do while we figure out the technical issues, we can move on to... Yeah, but Siman will be over here in a second. He'll be presenting from my computer. Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Sorry for that, but the connection does sometimes stop. So, whilst we're getting back to Taya, I would like to continue with his presentation about the larger picture within Ethiopia, development and operation of the sugar industry. I won't be able to say a lot more than the filled content of the presentation. What also already came forward from the interview with Abedah was the high potential for sugarcane production in Ethiopia. Well, as you may know or may not know, Ethiopia is blessed with a lot of hectares of irrigable land, a lot of water sources. But at this moment, actually, the total developed area of land, particularly with regards to irrigation, is still very minimal. For sugarcane, taking only two and a half percent of that area. However, the government of Ethiopia is very much looking at several dynamics. One, a very quickly growing population, a population that requires a lot more sugar, a population that is in development. We're very much looking at how can we expand production within Ethiopia and substitute imports. So, sugar development in the sector is actually one of the major sectors in which projects are taking place. You may have heard it through the news and the publications that there's projects being established all over factories as well. And potentially, and that is the idea of the Ethiopian government, it will very much contribute to the economy, also in terms of it being an export product. So, there's high attention towards the sugar industry, sugar growing. The policy that has been set out, because there have been a lot of problems in import, export. The policy that has been set out is really to manage the imports, which always have to be bought with using that very valuable foreign currency. And to steer towards creating exports. And again, as I mentioned, tackling the consumption within the country. The sector, as it is, is very attractive for investments. There's high potential for development, as I mentioned, only two and a half percent of the land has actually been developed. At this moment, actually last year, since 2019, the government has also started a policy shift with regards to the import, export, but more towards privatizing. As came forward from the previous presentation, all the current sugar production is state-owned managed. And at this moment, so since last year, the government is really looking at privatizing the sector. And actually since January 2019, 30 companies have shown interest and presented their profiles to work in joint ventures with the Ethiopian Sugar Corporation. This is just a quick overview of all the potential irrigation sites for sugarcane development. It's a large amount, and I believe several of these have already been developed. But overall, you can see that it really goes into the 100,000 hectares in terms of suitable area. With regards to development status, so sugarcane has been cultivated by small farmers since a long time, 16th century. With regards to large scale, since the past 70 years, so in the 50s of the last century, the experience started with commercial farming. It started actually at 1G, so at the sugar industry estate where Berra was interviewed from. And it was actually started by a debt-based company. Back then, the initial production was 140 tons of sugar per day. In 2014, the status of amount of factories was only that there were three, and they were producing 75,000 tons of sugar per annum. Yeah, from a total of 28,000 hectares. I'll have to cover it there a bit later. At this moment, 10 huge sugar development projects that I already mentioned require high investments and are under construction in various lowland areas of the country. And that's an important point that I want to mention is what Berra is actually reflecting on is that the new developments are very much impacting the current sugar estates and their rehabilitation. So there are intensification of produce. At this moment, about 103,000 hectares of land is covered with sugarcane. Under eight operational factories, production has passed 500,000 tons. And there is power generation, millions of liters of ethanol, so there's not only sugar obviously coming from sugarcane, but there's ethanol production as well. When all these projects, the 10 projects that I mentioned are completed, the intention is that the sugar production is boosted to 3.9 to 4.17 million times and ethanol production would be 181 million liters. As well as that the factories will contribute to 709 megawatts of electric power to the national grid. The amount of labor actually involved is tremendous. There's 15,000 members organized in 70 sugarcane outgrowing and providing associations on 17,000 hectares of land. So back to the development of sugarcane, the government goal is actually to satisfy local demand and become one of the top 10 sugar exporting countries. As I mentioned, there is quite a lot of import going on. There's an increasing population and increasing demand, increasing wealth, etc. for sugar. And so primary goals to satisfy local demand. However, the sector does have quite a lot of challenges to meet these goals. As I mentioned, the growing population has just meant that the sugar demand has not been able to meet the supply. And that relates to the implementation capacity, the finance available, foreign exchange, spare parts as well as machinery supply, which also was highlighted by Berra's presentation actually that all the spare parts, the drag lines, etc. all have to be bought with foreign currency. And that is a very big challenge. Also a challenge is water shortage during drought years. Good to add. I mean obviously representing Ethiopia as a country that is very well suited for agricultural production. But there is a challenge of drought periods, drought spells. Also in areas that are being irrigated, salinity is a challenge as well as waterlogging or vice versa, waterlogging and salinity. This, as also highlighted by Berra, is due to poor water management practices, drainage, amounts of irrigation and the underlying soil condition. There is high runoff in several areas in which sugarcane is actually being produced. There is quite an amount of liquid waste of sewage from processing plants, which in turn affects river systems, right, where there is the effort running to. Another challenge is this lack of improved technologies that can actually improve the existing production. Also looking at cane varieties, the challenge of preventive diseases and pests. And I think again here, also reflecting back that finance problem is sort of a reoccurrent thing. What Berra also mentioned is that tackling diseases and pests, getting the modern cane varieties, etc., are very much a plan and a priority, but they are difficult in terms of implementation. From the numbers also presented from Berra, it is possible to cultivate 162 tons of sugarcane per hectare within an average of 15 months. There are plenty of suitable soils, there is adequate water, not considering the drought. And the average sugarcane production per month would amount to more or less 9 to 11 within Ethiopia, comparing that to 6 to 8 tons per hectare per month, which are common in other parts of the world. But as mentioned, there is an evident gap between the potential yield and the yields that are actually being achieved so far. Land productivity itself is dependent, so within Ethiopia on the agro-climate regimes, so within Ethiopia, there are obviously different agro-climatic zones. This affects the length of cropping period, also the different water and soil conditions. And with that, the sugar stage in lower altitudes are relatively more productive due to warmer temperature and more fertile, fluvial soils in the plains of various rivers. Although it is possible to produce, referring back to the figures on the previous slide, between 9 and 11 tons of sugarcane per month, poor land and water management practices are lowering land productivity over a significant portion of the current farms. With regards to water productivity, water productivity largely depends on the zones again, soil conditions, and the irrigation water management, including the amounts of water, the irrigation technology, and the irrigation scheduling. And as Abera also already mentioned, this is really a challenge in streams where we're only using, for example, furrow systems, as opposed to systems that are more manageable, like with hydroflumes or with drag lines or with center pivots. The water productivity, one moment. So going back to the, well, back to the third point, the existing sugar mills, particularly in Wanzhi Shora, whether the sugar mill that Abera was actually presenting, and another one which we are investigating and looking into as well is Fincia. They do not obtain the best, let's say, state-of-the-art design standards and efficiency. And although they are required to be replaced or upgraded in order to improve, as also highlighted by the research that has been conducted, the studies as also highlighted by what Abera was mentioning. With regards to the application of WAFOR, managing extensive cane farm with conventional method is a big challenge. As Abera also highlighted, measuring water that is going in is possible, but within the system, particularly within furrow irrigated systems, it sort of gets lost, and it's very difficult to actually see where water is going. As farm science increases, modern management tools are available, and there with also irrigation in fields is better manageable, and crops can be monitored more appropriately. WAFOR and this could WAFOR the online open-source database using remote sensing products can actually help in monitoring growth and looking at where there is stresses in plants, which could also be from diseases. So remote sensing in that sense, the WAFOR portal, yes, could be a vital tool for helping irrigation scheme managers such as Abera as well. And within Ethiopia, there's ample opportunity to actually collaborate with a lot of different partners. So the partners here mentioned a 1G Showa, the sugar factory, a list of other sugar-producing industries such as Metahara, Finca, etc. They would be very eager to look into the opportunity of looking at irrigation, water supply, the adequacy, the equity within a system. And actually what was not mentioned by Abera about 1G's sugar cane factory also hosts the National Research Center for Sugarcane Production. Well, with regards to the Ethiopian Sugarcane Corporation was established in 2010. It plays a leadership role in development management and marketing of sugar. So that's an important thing that I didn't mention. The corporation manages all the sugar states, but it's also directly involved itself in the marketing of sugar and all its by-products. So they are also the ones that are distributing sugar for consumer retail as well as distributing sugar towards industries that need sugar. And that's, I think, what I can say about that. Also looking at the time. Yeah, I think that that is more or less what I can say. I hope that I've done a bit of justice to Taya. He will be available for questions. Thank you, Simon, for taking over the last minute. Taya has been active in the chat. So even if he couldn't present his voice, he's still active in the discussions and he will be available for the Q&A session at the end. So please let us know if you have questions. Put them in the chat box and we will bring them up then. So thank you again, Simon. And I think that's a nice overview of the industry level application of sugar cane and the expected expansions. But some questions that have come up already is what does that mean for a river basin context? Where does this water come and how does it impact other parts of a river basin? So now we will move on to Peter Wanderzach and he will talk about this topic shortly as we can just. Perfect. Okay. Yeah. So Peter, I will let you once it loads. Thank you, Lauren. Great pleasure to get this presentation. My background is irrigation engineering from Wageningen University. The first African river that I work on is sugarcane dominated in Kumati. And I did my PhD in Mexico on an irrigation scheme that also was dominated by sugarcane. So it's nice to take part in this webinar. Now I was asked to say something about sugarcane expansion and its implications for water use in a river basin context. Now I want to be a bit pro how do you call it? Can I move the slides myself? Yeah. Yes. The alternative title is sugarcane expansion, the basin manager's headache. That sets perhaps a bit the time. Now this is the overview of my presentation. First some facts, then I focus on four typical characteristics, four characteristics that are typical for sugarcane. There's immediate implications for water management. And I will discuss a few options of how to resolve those. And I look forward to the discussion afterwards. This is the graph from faro stuff. So we don't know how reliable these data are, but the green line is the yield in tons per hectare. And the blue line is the expanse, the area harvested. So you see a nice increase. There's an increase of one to two percent per year. The average yield increases a bit very slowly. It looks steep, but it is not so steep. It depends on the scale. Now in Africa we see also the expansion of the area cultivated and harvested. But unfortunately we see that there is a decrease in crop yields. So something has to be done. And then one more fact, perhaps of interest. The green line here is the sugar price, world market price. And the red line is the maize price for comparison. So market price of sugar is very volatile. Now I turn to four characteristics of sugarcane that are important for water management. Most of the sugarcane is cultivated as an industrial crop. And I'll come back to the implication. We all know that sugarcane is relatively a large, water thirsty crop. It is of course a perennial crop and it is not a seed crop. And that is relevant. Now first, sugarcane is an industrial crop. It requires a mill and thus it requires some minimum scales of production. And typically operations are centralized, typically through an estate. And this influences the social and economic relationships between the state staff, the state owners, the cane cutters, the out growers oftentimes, as has been mentioned before, water managers and others. Often with, of course, Ethiopia is the big exception. Sugarcane production has a colonial history and a history of forced labor and even of slavery. Currently there are strong sugar lobbies promoting the production and consumption of sugar and sugarcane. And this should not be underestimated. There's a huge lobby in Brussels to fight against the tax on sugar. Although sugar is in the European context a kind of a pandemic creating all kinds of unhealthy situations. At this moment we have five deaths per day in Holland from the pandemic, COVID pandemic, and we have more than a hundred related to heart diseases and things related to obesity. And further, there are all kinds of subsidies that distort the mark for sugar and ethanol, which complicates matters. This is just a bit of a background. Okay, you all know that water is a thirsty crop. We saw these incredible numbers for Ethiopia. I'm always thinking, okay, I'm one meter 90 high, so I will drown in the water layer that is required for a year's crop in the sugarcane. Sugarcane is a perennial crop. Have you heard the cartoons? Typically, a crop is standing there for five to ten years. This means that it fixes water requirements of the area planted with sugarcane for several years ahead. And that's a very important implication for basin management. And fortunately, sugarcane is not a seed crop. It doesn't need to flower before it can produce its good. Unlike, for instance, all the grains. So for the grains, you first have to put water on the crop before you can harvest anything. Not so with sugarcane, and this has an implication that during the youth formation stage, more or less 150 to 300 days after planting or returning, you can do deficit irrigation with limited damage. Okay, implications for water management. The first three characteristics that I mentioned make sugarcane headache for the basin manager. In particular, in closing basins, the sugarcane continues to expand. And because it fixes the water requirements also in dry years or even in dry years. Let's turn to some data from Faustat again. Now from Mozambique and Espatini. And these are countries which have a lot of sugarcane also on the Incomati, which I have mentioned before. And you see that there is an expansion where as my... Can you use this one? There's an expansion of sugarcane in Mozambique and also in Espatini, also known as Swaziland. Swaziland has very good operations. And you see they have high stable yields of around 100 tons per hectare. And in Mozambique it's really fluctuating. But overall increasing. Anyway, now I have to move to the next slide. In such closing basins, problems are inevitable during periods with below average water availability. As the flexibility is reduced due to the sugarcane because of its perennial crop and its high water use requirements. So what are options for water management to solve this rigidity in the system? You can only solve this by institutional and regulatory measures in closing basins because the physical measures like putting more dams in is in most cases not any longer economically and practically feasible. So possible options for the basin manager define a cat on the acreage of perennial crops allowed vis-à-vis the annual crops and force deficit irrigation of sugarcane during droughts and in times of severe droughts allow seasonal transfers of water permits between irrigators of annual and irrigators of perennial crops. Meaning that the perennial crop owners will pay a compensation to the annual crop growers to say okay for girl one year or one season's crop and I will give you so much money so that I can use your water permit. Okay there are probably many more options and I invite all of you to submit your suggestions to solve this problem. Now in conclusion these options are institutionally demanding and information intensive. They require strong and legitimate institutions especially because often large interests are at stake in settings with large inequalities. For instance I hope I don't say anything wrong that for instance in Switzerland one of the biggest owners of the sugarcane state is the king. So it will be quite difficult for a basin manager to enforce for instance deficit irrigation in such a content but it also holds for large companies who own sugar estates who normally are very powerful and have a large interest. And then the annual crop owners tend to have much less political power. Moreover these options require reliable information at adequate temporal and spatial scales and here perhaps vapor and similar products can really play a good role, a positive role. Currently our water institutions are often not strong enough to seek innovative options as I suggested. Try these out, learn, improve and grow. Also the legal system may even not allow certain options. In many countries it is not allowed to temporarily transfer water permits from one permit holder to the next. So my final conclusion is there is much work to be done and I want to thank you for your attention. A really nice overview and again a reminder that everything is connected. So the water that we need for sugarcane has to come from somewhere else and if we don't have enough who is giving up their water and connects to the politics and public health and it's a really nice reminder that it will require many people and many different institutions and creative solutions to make sure that this industry is sustainable. And so something that kind of touches upon is okay if you have a sugar plantation or a sugar estate how can you make it more productive with the land that you currently have? So making an intensification of your land or would you like to expand the amount of land that you have to produce more sugar? So this is a topic that a baby Chukala will go into further detail about and using some of the data from the WAPOR announcement. Thank you Lauren. It's my voice here. Okay. Yeah. Thank you also for the previous presenters. They give a nice presentation and my presentation will be on intensification versus land expansion in sugarcane production and I will in fact support my presentation with asking some questions and also they will help me to guide the presentation that I will have till the end. So the first question is is the increase in sugarcane production in Africa is it from land expansion or is it from improving productivity? We already have seen Peter give answer to this but I will maybe still ask the same and then the second question is what is the potential for intensification on existing land? Is there any potential? What is the third question is what is the implication of intensification on land use and water consumption? So to start from the background also answering the first question this is the sugarcane production in Africa to the left is the FAO start 2005 showing only the production in Africa and to the right is for 2012 maybe if we zoom in we could see it's in a larger picture and then here in the left you see some countries even either they didn't report or maybe there is no sugar cultivation but then in the right in 2012 there is areas which start to cultivate and in fact if you see both graphs the country in Africa with the largest sugarcane coverage is in South Africa but well coming to the main question intensification there is expansion in fact just comparing these two only these two years 2005 versus 2012 and based on FAO start data there is an increase in land expansion by 13% 1, 3% and in fact it's also increasing as we speak the first second presenter already showed also from the FAO start showed that there is an increasing trend in production however the productivity again comparing those two years from FAO start data it's almost stable or even showing on average decreasing so on average from 61 ton per hectare per year to about 59 ton per hectare per year then answering our first question so most of the production increase in Africa is coming from land expansion it's not really from improving productivity but then the question is is there a scope for intensification so most of the next presentation and after conclusion will focus answering those things and also showing how we could analyze answering this intensification question so for that I zoom in into one of the sugarcane producing the country and also a scheme which is called Cinevana in Mozambique and I will focus only on about 10,000 hectare of that Cinevana sugarcane plantation in fact this name already have been appearing in our previous webinars so it should be very famous name Cinevana and in this area in fact 3 or about 3 irrigation methods are predominant that is sprinkler, ferro and center pivot so the indication is there a scope to intensify within this area which is Cinevana this area have almost the same agro-climate zone it means that the potential to increase with a climate limit is comparable and also it's possible so what method and data I have used to answer those things so data from vapor vapor data for those of you who maybe would just join this webinar VAPOR is FEO portal to monitor water productivity so open access of remotely sensor driven data and then we use 3 layers of this vapor data land class classification actually VAPOR transpiration, net primary production and also we supplement this data with local information as well as the scheme boundary and the agronomic parameters and then we calculated the seasonal water consumption and production using those data and next we calculate the water and land productivity followed by identifying what is the productivity target in that area and then followed by assessing the productivity caps and eventually then we showed how closing productivity caps have implications to the production as well as implications to water consumption in fact this is supported with calculation equations which I will explain here so the biomass in the x-axis here is calculated and explained here in the box and in the y-axis we have the biomass water productivity and if we brought those variables per pixel for the whole the Sinawana area we see the orange clouds of pixels and then from this if we can we set a target definitely we could set a target in this case we defined it as a 95 percentile of both productivity biomass as well as water productivity and then here where the two lines cross is the productivity target then once we have the productivity target the gap was calculated by comparing this productivity target with a productivity at each pixel so that gives us how much is the productivity gap and eventually we calculated the production projection as well as implication on water consumption and here at the bottom of my slides in fact the whole activities in the green box are there which will guide also what will be the result so the next result is what is the land productivity so the land productivity here plotted for five seasons from 2014 up to now and all those bars showing the biomass in tone per hectare per year the first three shows in the cluster the biomass at Sinawana for different irrigation technology followed by center pivot and then the whole scheme and then the last column shows the yield of for Mozambique again from the Sinawana from the FAO stats in fact the difference between those is not purely just it's a different but rather it's because the last one is talking or showing the yield which it means after multiplying the biomass by harvest index the difference is due to this report that is the yield from the FAO stats or Mozambique is an average over the whole Mozambique area which includes also rampage so this is the biomass and as you could see the variation is there across technology even also the bar showing the standard deviation across space so again this land productivity across space as you could see it varies so it varies from the smallest red about 15 tone per hectare per year to more than 100 tone per hectare per year and also the graph in the right shows the distribution function of this biomass across the Sinawana so it nicely shows the normal distribution where also coloring values which are above the 95 percentile which we said they can be as a target or beyond those targets so similarly we plot for water productivity and also this water productivity varies across space and also the distribution also here shows the normal distribution so with this then can we identify the target so to identify the target we plot in the X axis the biomass and in the Y axis the biomass water productivity and then as I already showed if we plot them so if we plot them then we can show nicely the relationship between those two and also the target productivity which is indicated by the dark star so from this of course those dark stars and I mean those points or spots which have productivity more than the 95 percentile are indicated with the green color and in fact they are also spread across the whole space in Sinawana so those spots could be considered for one season as the target and then the productivity gap eventually could be calculated by considering the value of those targets versus the value at each pixel so the productivity gap in the left is for biomass gap in the right is the biomass water productivity gaps for five seasons and also for each irrigation technologies so as it is seen in this picture the biomass gap is large under furrow irrigation compared to center pivot for instance whereas the water productivity gap is very large or high under area irrigated by center pivot compared to area irrigated by furrow so then anyhow having those gaps then we calculated the or we start to talk about what is by closing gaps if we close those average gaps what it implies so we have this graph in the X is again the biomass in the Y axis the biomass water productivity and it has now additional variable which is water consumption imagine this is water consumption per year it's not even 12 months or 15 or 18 months so we have the actual evapotranspiration in millimeter per year and as you could see all those pixels to the left the reddish one consume less compared to the dark green one so by improving or closing productivity we mean that either we move those points in the horizontal to the right which is following RO1 then it means that is closing productivity gap also then consuming more water also it can be following pass 2 which means we follow this since they have the same or almost equal evapotranspiration it means it is possible to close the productivity gap without any implication to additional or without any implication to water consumption and there is also a possibility following RO3 which is a vertical move where it is possible even to save water while closing productivity so then if we close those productivity gaps what is implication to the production so the implication while this is already indicated per year the average gap so there is a possibility to harvest more than 100,000 of tone per hectare per year I mean tone per the scheme per year that's in Havana and also this has in fact implication on water consumption and it might consume about 17.4 millimeter cube and also a possibility of saving about 1.4 millimeter cube in fact this saving doesn't mean that it is saving which could be reallocated for other area or for other sectors because it's a moisture within the root zone which can be also green water but if it is a blue one then there is a possibility even to save the water from the water withdrawal end to applying imagine this water consumption either additional or saving is just only comparing the existing irrigation scheme because there is a possibility yet to increase the productivity for instance by consuming less water than what is indicated here for instance if we are applying mulching and other soil moisture conserving practices interventions of course still the consumption are expected to be less and maybe the saving more so this will take me to the final conclusion so intensification at Havana by closing biomass gap can increase water productivity as well as production and the production can be increased by more than 100,000 per year this is in fact equivalent to producing from more than 1,000 hectares or this implies even we are saving about 14% of the existing scheme if we are closing the productivity gap but this comes with implication to water consumption would be even higher if the production gain is coming from land expansion so yeah we are comparing this addition and water consumption but then I would expect to be less if I compare it the yield is increased from the expansion so subsequent studies could additionally consider in fact sucrose content rather than sugarcane because this is also an indicator for let's say sugar production which is the marketable product from sugarcane and also it has to do with weather shortage already Peter nicely said we could have the defecation so it means it have even a positive implication to sucrose rather than just indicating there is a reduction into the biomass so what for place an important role in fact we have seen this since the first webinar up to now and it really bridge the data gaps particularly the special details which are unavailable from the additional means of data collection the first presenter already shown they have just one data center to predict, operate and do everything so in such kind of cases also for future expansion or planning could really play a pivotal role however validation and accurate interpretation of results and formulation of practical solutions can be made if VAPOR analysis and results are complemented with observer data and the local information so yes we have nice data and also let us check it and let us also try to apply it that's my final message and thank you and see you in the question and answer discussion thank you baby that was a really nice review of how VAPOR can be used to determine the impacts of intensification versus expansion and I think it's a nice tool that managers would like to have at their disposal next we're running close on time but next we're going to go to a short video from our final speakers Martin von der Stuggen who works with he's a global sugar beet specialist and a project manager for the breeding components of what they do and he will discuss sugar beet breeding for drought tolerance and an example about rotation cropping with sugar canes so first we will I have a big passion and fascination for plants and now I can do a job where I can actually fight with plants and try to get more potential from plants so that farmers can easily deal with it and I can get a very fascinating result plants need water to grow to produce a lack of water a drought year can bring up and that's what we need to do water is getting scarcer and the oil for water I think it's getting closer to the real time and we can see that the climate is getting cooler, the seasons are getting more extreme so the varieties have to get more robust sugar beetes are stable less impetus for nitrogen less impetus for water it's a strategy to keep sugar beet competitive with sugar beet and to create for the same sugar beet more water is needed you know where the beet is being used the beet is mainly used for infrastructure manufacturing, land-based farming you know that in the palm of your hand water is strong and the climate changes it's dry, it's dry and it plays a role and of course it's peaceful let's see what happens a mechanism is that the plant invests more in its root cells so it makes a deeper root cell so that actually droughts are avoided by adding deeper water layers the second mechanism is to ensure that a plant doesn't need water or has less damage during periods of drought stress the second mechanism will actually function well in dry conditions as in irrigated conditions to reduce irrigation volume plants that don't actually use less water can just use more water will reduce irrigation the irrigation need will always be the same dry and tolerant plants will mainly be used in semi-arid areas from western Europe to continental and eastern Europe plants with less irrigation needs improved efficiency in water use will mainly be used in irrigated markets such as Spain, Turkey and also certain markets of North Africa such as Egypt and Morocco here we have all combinations of different plants we are going to take the normal parts, we take the 1000 milliliters of a pot and we take it out and we put a donor from another plant we put a pot and we make hundreds and thousands of combinations here we do it small and we are going to put the pot in the pot here we have the pot and there are all small pots a special machine that is made on the field and we saw it at a distance of 8 centimeters and they all have to be set at a distance of 20 centimeters to get all the small rashes that you drive and then the job is done and with a special machine when you look at the leaves in the leaves you get all the rashes I remember a nice experience with a farmer in Italy Italy had a very extreme dry season it was one of the few fields in that region where it was really after noon there was relatively fresh and the farmer thanked us a lot and let us know that his contribution was fantastic can you hear me? okay after this little video which was recorded a long time ago already but I added a few slides so I'm Martin van der Stukke plant breeder at Cess Van der Hava as you could see in the movie already I added a few slides showing a little bit more specifications on the other sugar crop sugar beet a bit on the work we do on drought tolerance and the progress that we make on that and then a little side track to our tropical beet concept which we are rolling out in India for instance so sugar beet it's not a perennial crop in contrast to the sugar cane so it's sown and then 5-6 months later the roots are harvested piled up as you can see there on the picture and transported to the factory and processed for sugar extraction yields typically 80-100 tons of root yield per hectare in some regions up to 140 tons in more stressful regions a little bit less sugar content is typically 15-20% and this results in a white sugar yield at a factory of 17-18 ton on average per hectare of white sugar it's also used as an energy crop just like sugar cane most used byproducts are the leaves to pulp the molasses mainly for animal feed purposes leaves also as an as an organic fertilizer and like mentioned in the video I think a big difference or a big strength of our crop is the low water requirement so even in tropical regions or in regions with very high irradiation it never exceeds 8,000 liters per hectare so on average the water consumption is about 3 times lower than that of sugar cane and the second interesting characteristic of sugar beet is that it has a very small and simple genome which allows for a very active and dynamic breeding and this you can see on the graph on the right shows a bit of the history of sugar beet breeding and then you can see that we'll try to bring up this pointer here in the 1950s the average sugar beet variety still yielded around 5 tons of sugar per hectare while today like I mentioned before we are above 15 tons per hectare so that's the progress that we make and we still achieve the sugar yield increase of 1.5% per year and more and more in the last decades we combined this increase with increasing more and more or bringing in more and more disease tolerance to a multitude of diseases that our crop encounters so sugar beet has grown in a bit more than 50 countries the main areas are of course West Europe, Russia, USA so it's often considered as a the temperate sugar crop but in fact there are also substantial significant growing regions in Egypt, Morocco Iran, Chile and in fact even India and in fact those are the regions where the acreage is expanding mostly another thing to bring to your attention is that sugar beet has mainly grown under rain fat conditions only about 15% of the global sugar beet cultivation takes place under irrigated conditions so that's also very different from cane this means the fact that it's mainly grown under these conditions it means that it gets exposed to drought and sometimes severe droughts like was mentioned in the movie already and here the little bar graph shows the impact that drought tolerant varieties and breeding for drought tolerant varieties can have so current drought tolerant varieties under a severe drought they lose around 10% in root yield while a regular drought susceptible variety easily loses 30% in root yield so that's a significant impact also important is that these drought tolerant varieties can combine these drought tolerant with competitive performance under well water conditions as well so this is an interesting angle from a breeder to further work on this genetic variation that already exists and so we have intensified our breeding programs so that we start with identifying the best for performing varieties under drought in the fields making heavily relying on remote sensing technologies also for that and those varieties we take to indoor greenhouse screening platforms where we actually verify whether this increased drought tolerance is triggered by an improved water use efficiency rather than with an increased water uptake efficiency because the latter we believe is not really a sustainable strategy because it will only further deplete the soil water availability so we mainly focus on increasing water use efficiency and we experience that this is possible without triggering any yield penalties or so on so our goal is to further improve and we are quite ambitious in this further improve the performance of our varieties under these droughts which occur more and more frequently with climate change then my last slide I make a little side step to our tropical beets and a little bit on the adoption in the Indian cane regions so what is a tropical beets it is first of all a beets, a sugar beet variety that is adapted to the tropical climate so high temperatures also high night temperatures compared to what you get in the more temperate regions and of course if you move into new regions you experience new diseases sclerosis as you can see here on the picture is a nasty example of that so then we also have developed and breed for tolerances against these diseases and only then you have a variety that can sustain profitable growth in the new region so the feedback that we get from the farmers in India that have adopted our crop and started growing it is the short cycle so with a cycle of 5 to 6 months in a subtropical or tropical region you can achieve 2 cropping cycles a year and the fact that you rotate crops also contributes to the maintenance of good soil quality good soil integrity which they also appreciate and if you you steer or you plan it well you can steer your harvest towards a period when cane supply is lower providing the factory with a prolonged supply of sugar bulk source material another advantage is that the wild ancestor of sugar beets originates from coastal regions it even grows on the beach as you can see here on this picture which means that by nature it has a high tolerance to salinity pressure and like it was mentioned before quite low water requirement which is very interesting of course from an education perspective and I also mentioned the breeding progress already which is rather convenient because if you run into some kind of agronomical problem a new disease or any other issue there is a very high chance that you can breed to overcome the problem and then finally so the possible cropping systems that have been explored and implemented in India in the region where sugar beet has been introduced is the most adopted system is one where between the renewal of a cane plantation they fit in a sugar beet cultivation so have a little rotation with the sugar beets and all possibility is that you combine sugar beet with another sugar crop sweet sorghum for instance and the interesting thing about that is then you can combine two sugar crops within one year and then the third option is what we know best from the temperate region is that you rotate sugar beet with cereals or other crops and in more southern regions sub-tropical regions this as an advantage we can do two croppings within one year and maintaining a better salt quality by rotating so this was what I had to share if you want to read a bit more about tropical beet concept and related topics I can refer you to a brochure that our communication department made it's on our website and I'm happy to take further questions later on Thank you Martin, that's a really nice presentation and a way to show that there's possibilities to diversify your sugar crops not only with sugar cane but maybe changing the seasons with sugar beets or converting to sugar beets if it's more suitable to the condition so now I think I would like to thank all of the presenters we were a little bit over time so we appreciate everyone who's still with us we will do a quick question and answer session but if you have to leave please visit our project website or the waterchannel.tv to see the question and answer session at a later time so I think the first question talks about I think getting back to Taya's presentation what would the source of water for the various developments of sugar cane so would it come from groundwater or dam I know there has been some discussion in the chat but it's mostly surface diversions but what would that mean for water security for other sectors for example so if Taya's available maybe I can hear you during this question otherwise Can you hear me Lauren? Hello Lauren Yeah we can tell you Okay good good As I try to I'm trying to communicate also my ekept and colleague was communicating all the sources for the sugar plantation are from surface water the big rivers have gold wedges the sugar development projects are as we said they are in the lowlands these lowlands are the converges of lots of river flows and also sediment load is lying over the lowlands so all the source of water for the mega sugar projects are the big rivers it's all the surface water source but there is a plan there is a planned activity to use groundwater for sugar development in the future and the GTP-1 and GTP-2 sugar was also in the plan to investigate about two million hectares of land not only for sugar plantation also for a kind of mixed culture it's also in the plan but not yet is implemented for sugar cave That's my answer Thank you Taya we really appreciate that I know as water becomes more scarce it's always an in-demand resource so having diversified sources of water is important The next question for the application of water It's a very interesting question but I don't have answer in my head I'm not sure whether there is any plan but there are a lot of works going on in fact well I mean partly as a research for instance there are already few publications which compared to VAPO in Africa even there is a recent publication that compared the ET of VAPO across the whole Africa maybe I will check it and then try to send the link otherwise there is no one from ours just immediately now that we are going to do it but indeed there are things happening Thanks Vivian The next question I think is for Martin Can one and the same sugar factory process both sugar beet and sugar cane Yes with some minor adaptations once you are at the juice level the process is exactly the same the processing is slightly different but there are companies who developed a hybrid system which can deal with both crops the name of the company is the SMET I think it's in the brochure that I mentioned before so indeed a cane factory cannot just start processing sugar beet some small modifications to the system are needed but there are solutions that enable dealing with both crops and then a question about first first and second how developed it is it's available in fact for the tropical beet we could build further on the varieties that we had already in countries like Egypt and Chile and just further improve it a bit so we didn't have to start from scratch we just had to fine tune it for the local environment and regarding the region in India I'm afraid I don't know the answer to this but the expertise in the company is the drought topic, the tropical beet topic I'm not very very much involved in I can transfer the question to one of my colleagues who follow that closer and come back to you with an answer so I don't know who asked the question but you're always welcome to send me an email and I can follow up if needed I also put a link to your company website for information in the brochure as well next is more of a comment from Pooja but she's talking about how for example in India where they were planting sugarcane intensively they're moving towards more diversified crops which would improve food security and water productivity and flexibility in years of drought I think this is a nice topic I don't know if Navy Taya or Peter or somebody who's familiar with this topic is this something that's also happening in Ethiopia for example or other sugarcane diversified crops I find this very difficult to answer but you see in the Incomat which I mentioned in the South African stuff but you see in the Incomati which is a river that is shared between South Africa, Switzerland and Mozambique you have a lot of sugarcane which also have a lot of forest plantations which are very fat but they consume blue water and you have a lot of fruit trees so they are really locked into everything that is perennial so moving from one perennial to the other may increase the value for instance from sugarcane to fruit trees or something but they'll still keep you locked in so perhaps to try out a bit of the tropical sugar beads could be an interesting experiment actually I do know if people are interested in this topic it will be covered next week in our socio-economics around water productivity where Wageningen will discuss the trade-offs between different kinds of agricultural production and what it means for things like food security and water security so I think it is a difficult question to answer and it might be case specific but again we encourage you to join us next week as that will get into more details on that topic so I think there were a few more questions but I think we're about 15 okay let's do this we'll have this as our last question from Pasquale this is for Bebe talking about his analysis with Wapour I think we're in a realm of high-position agriculture for the patient it's an honor to have you here in fact we didn't really measure the degree of let's say at crazy but what we did is that at least we have some sort of confidence with this data we agronomically test if they make sense or not from 2009 up to now and then we removed or I didn't present the data between 2009 up to end of 2013 it's because the error at least we couldn't confirm from the agronomic explanation but then directly answer to your question just the accuracy and the comparison needs to be done and I would recommend just only the procedure to be applied maybe Peter want to say something please yes because the plan is that your presentation will be triangulated with crop yield data from the from the estate but we haven't had permission yet to use those data and they measure water application very badly in the Sinovani state but in all sugar cane mills that I know the crop yield is very accurately measured both the cut and burned cane as well as the sucrose content per lot and so that will be very valuable information and we are going to share the paper as it is now with the Sinovani company with the request whether they can also share crop data for certain plots just to check the great thanks everyone for your answers I think we're about 15 to 20 minutes over if we have unanswered questions we'll take a look at them and put them on the website and send them around to our expert panel for their answers so again we want to thank everyone that was on the panel for your presentations and your videos we really appreciate learning from you today and again a really big thank you to our participants especially those who stayed a little bit late for the question and answer session if you would like to rewatch this webinar you can go to the project website waterpip.un-nihg.org or the waterchannel.tv you can also download the presentations and we'll put up additional information on those locations as well now when you exit the webinar it will send you to the survey again it's a survey that gives us more information about what you're interested in learning and who you are and if you have filled it out already thank you you only need to fill it out once but if you're new we would really appreciate it if you completed it for us so