ANALYSIS OF BILLING WATER EFFICIENCY AS A TOOL OF ENVIROMENTAL CONTROL IN SOME IRRIGATED CROPS IN SÃO PAULO STATE.

Abstract

The environmental resources damages has conducted to the establishment of environmental control policies that aims to internalize environmental external costs. The tools of environmental control can be arranged in two categories: command and control and economic incentives. The billing for water use in agriculture determined by the Project of Law 676/2000, is placed in the second category and obeys to the polluter pays principle. The fee defined by the project is, at most, R$0,01/m3 of extracted, impounded or derived water in the State of São Paulo. It was observed that in many cases, the miss determination of billing the use of water tax do not reaches the objective of controlling water use, leading to super use in some cases and scarcity, otherwise. The hypothesis of this work is that the billing of water use tax adopted in São Paulo State, will have effects only in terms of income generation, but will not have effects to improve the water use efficiency. To verify this hypothesis it was analyzed the economic impact of billing water in the economic results of three irrigated cultures in São Paulo State: tomato in the protected crop system; irrigated bean crop; and irrigated rice crop. The greater economic impact, the farmers will prefer increase the investments to control the water use, like combat the water loss, improve the equipments measurement, adopt and develop other management techniques. In the analyzed crops, it was not verified significant impact in the economic results, not shaping economic incentive to adoption of actions that improve the efficiency of water use.