Iran's Water Crisis in relation to the Country's Agriculturization and De-agriculturalization: Explaining the Relationship between Water Crisis in Agriculture Sector and Country's Oil Dependency

The increase in level of lands and being filled with water after the Islamic revolution resulted in high degree of water usage for farming. At present, more than 90 percent of country's water resources are being used in agriculture, the great amount of which is being wasted due to non-standard methods. The pressurized irrigation domain which leads to high water efficiency is 5 percent. In this paper we intend to find an answer to why no measure is being taken for water efficiency in farming. The results of this study show that the main cause for not taking water saving into consideration in farming, apart from legal, managerial and topographic barriers for implementing new methods, is dependency on oil economy; which on one hand causes the workforce and fund to move toward non-commercial phenomena and on the other, has spoiled expectations from other sectors to create surplus value. Therefore, the government, through increasing the level of lands and watering them, provides the ground for unstable employment caused by populist policies and following self-sufficient provided conversations (agriculturization) and on the contrary abandons the watered lands by excessive delusion caused by oil revenues (de-agriculturization).