Shared centre pivot. An experience of smallholder irrigation in Midwest Brazil

Irrigation enables crop intensification and improves the smallholder’s household livelihood. Centre pivot irrigation, a system predominantly used in medium to large individual farms, has recently been promoted for smallholder collective irrigation in developing countries. The objective of this research was to assess the irrigation performance and evolution of shared centre pivot systems at the Itamarati Rural Settlement in the Midwest of Brazil, where around 1000 smallholders were organized in small groups between 2001 and 2004, to farm 85 centre pivots collectively. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected in a mixed-approach, and used to characterize the evolution and sustainability of the centre pivots shared. We collected information from published and unpublished reports, and we conducted our own surveys, interviewing twenty-five farm groups and forming focus groups in a 3-year phased process. Irrigation intensity (the ratio of irrigated area over the area equipped for irrigation) declined sharply from 0.75 in 2004/2005–0.12 in 2020. The immediate pressures triggering the abandonment process were: the farmers’ insufficient technical capability, low productivity of the irrigated crops, and high operational and maintenance costs. At the root of these drivers was the incapacity to exert the collective action required by the highly centralized shared centre pivot system. The progressive giving up of collective management and the concentration of land in larger farms seems to be inexorable. The Itamarati experience was a paradigm of a top-down project whose lessons are important for policymakers. We concluded that centralized collective systems are unsustainable unless the community that adopts them has a high sense of union and a capacity for collective action.