As an essential component of world food security, agricultural productivity needs to be maintained in Southeast Asia, a major source of the world's food supply. Water is the most important technical limiting factor for agricultural production even in this region, most of which receives a sufficient amount of water during the rainy season but lacks suitable management systems for its effective usage, particularly in rainfed areas. Development of improved systems for water resource management must be a focal point for agricultural development in this region. To improve economic options for farmers in Southeast Asian countries, it is essential to provide them with appropriate technologies for water management. Incorporation of value-added approaches for high economic returns is also needed for the future development of agriculture in Southeast Asia.
JIRCAS has been conducting collaborative research in this region, with a focus on Thailand, for more than three decades. In its most recent collaborative research project, from 1995 to 2002, a number of key component technologies for sustainable agricultural production were developed in Northeast Thailand. These now need to be adapted to meet farmer conditions in Northeast Thailand, and the individual technologies need to be combined into new production systems and tested under real farm conditions. There is increasing recognition of the value of participatory methods for closing the gap between research results and farmer practices. Based on the above perspectives, a new seven-year research project titled "Increasing economic options in rainfed agriculture in Indochina through efficient use of water resources" has now been launched. An overview of this new project is provided in this article, together with a discussion of several key issues in water resource management in rainfed areas.