Abstract

The Gezira Scheme—one of the world’s largest gravity‑fed irrigation systems—faces chronic water‑timing failures, seasonal credit shortages, and labour constraints that destabilize its official crop rotation and generate large fluctuations in total net return. Although the rotation is fixed on paper, farmers’ actual rotation has become dynamic, reactive, and constraint‑driven, especially after the 2005 Gezira Act. Using 50 years of data, this study applies a Vector Autoregression (VAR) with an Error Correction Model (ECM) to quantify the dynamic interactions among crop areas (cotton, wheat, sorghum, groundnuts) and total net return. The Error Correction Term captures how quickly the system returns to long‑run equilibrium after water shortages, rainfall variability, price changes, or labour constraints shocks.

Results show that the production system is highly sensitive to water timing, with cotton and wheat acting as the main sources of volatility, sorghum functioning as a stabilizing buffer crop, and groundnuts responding opportunistically to liquidity stress. A central structural finding is that only about 25% of the scheme can be irrigated simultaneously due to long‑term deterioration of conveyance capacity, forcing staggered irrigation cycles and chronic timing failures. Small shocks to water, finance, or labour trigger large behavioural adjustments, causing short‑run volatility and long‑run disequilibrium. Shifting irrigation from push to pull system at the minor and field canal levels—while maintaining the 25% simultaneous‑irrigation constraint—creates a demand‑driven water delivery regime that dramatically reduces water stress and timing failures, stabilizes crop choices, and improves both short‑run and long‑run system performance. This intervention with digital transformation aligns directly with VAR-ECM findings showing water as the primary driver of volatility and offers a practical, resilience‑engineering pathway to restore stability and predictability in the Gezira Scheme.

The study proposes a resilience‑engineering intervention framework—including downstream pull‑system irrigation at minor and field canal levels, Bt cotton adoption, reducing cotton area to save water, predictable seasonal finance, and mechanization—to restore system stability and improve water use efficiency. VAR-ECM stability tests confirm that these interventions directly address the structural drivers of volatility.

This study provides the first dynamic econometric assessment of the Gezira Scheme’s production system, quantifies crop‑specific roles in system sensitivity and stability, identifies water‑timing constraints as the dominant behavioural driver of rotation deviations. Significant contribution of the study is using econometric model for analyzing short‑run adjustments and long‑run equilibrium relationships in Gezira production system and introduces a novel integration of resilience‑engineering interventions within a VAR-ECM framework to guide sustainable transformation of large‑scale irrigation systems.

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