A starting comment

New analysis needs consolidation
Water productivity is a key concept that bridges two factors: water consumption by agriculture and the livelihood support it provides. The analysis of water productivity has provided extremely useful insight, not least through the excellent work in the book Water for Food: Water for Life. The basin focal projects have drawn extensively on that work and in so doing, have realized there is a need to extend the breadth, depth and length of some key concepts. The BFPs and others provide new analysis. This is what we now aim to consolidate.

Broader, deeper, longer?
Broader: Analysis at basin scale suggests that the concept of water productivity needs to be broader so that it can provide further insight about the productivities of livestock systems, mixed livestock-cropping systems and fisheries. Furthermore, there is increasing cross-over between these users, and examination of trade-offs between agricultural and non-agricultural uses of water.
Deeper: Analysis from BFPs has also demonstrated the value of estimating water productivity over large areas, using existing and new techniques. Analysis of water productivity from experimental plots still has a place but observations of large areas, and for different seasons enables deeper analysis of variations in water productivity.
Longer: Examination of multi-facetted economic systems within basins suggests that we need to look further down the water product ‘supply chain’. The full value of production, and the reasons why farmers do what they do may be understandable only through the analysis of multi-phase systems, in which a product of one phase passes through to the next.