Water and environmental technologies are increasingly gaining attention in the world's development strategies and economy.

Water, apart from being a human consumption, is a resource on which Agriculture significantly depends through state of the art irrigation in countries like Israel.

Agriculture in Israel is advanced, with all sorts of opportunities and possibilities, inspite of its desert status.

For example, the country's agriculture sector is an intensive system of production, starching from the need to overcome the scarcity in natural resources, especially water and arable land, particularly south of the country.

Just outside Telviv, the capital of Israel, a one and a half hour drive from Ashdod city to Dimona, is one big and wonderful irony,-with the desert stretch having significant distances of successful farms, all green under irrigation technology.

There is a sense of possibility with the kind of water technologies being developed at the centre of dry lands to get high productivity.

The Israel NEWTech project manager Gilad Peled told this reporter in Tel Aviv that the constant growth in agricultural production is due to the close cooperation between researchers and farmers.

Infact, Dimona, which is home to the Rotem Industrial Park where all the research on agriculture and energy is done to sell to local investors and the rest of the world.

"They develop and apply new methods of agriculture", said Gilad Modern agriculture is carried out on the desert stretches, which are more than half of the country's desert land.

With only 24,000sq.km, Israel is roughly a twentieth of the size of Tanzania but has a per capita of $23,000.

Yet Tanzania has only $525.1 despite its relatively vast size and resources.

Currently, most of Tanzania's agriculture is rain-fed which makes it vulnerable during climatic variations. Recent examples are the current food shortages in 20 districts countrywide.

As such, water and Irrigation minister Prof Mark Mwandosya's appearance at the fifth International Water Technologies and environmental Control Exhibition (WATEC) later this year is expected to give Tanzania practical applications in areas such as water and energy efficiency, water quality, desalination, and water supply.

Israel has an estimated GDP topping $170 billion, translating into a per capita income of $26, 000 for the 7.4 million citizens.

Tanzania experiences food shortages yet she has enough resources for feeding her population. Nutritional deficiencies are also common in many parts of the country.

Irrigation agriculture is the way forward because the rain-pattern is becoming more unreliable.

According to the 2005 Demographic Health Survey Tanzania's, 1.4 million children are underweight, 2.4 million stunting and 193,000 under five wasting. Worse still, 4.2 million children, according to the THDS, are anaemic.

The THDS says that rising food prices, could weigh heavily on families' abilities and households to have proper nutrition for themselves and their children.

This, according to the survey, could undermine the country's progress towards the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) one and four. This is to reduce hunger and child mortality rate by two thirds.

Tanzania's population growth rate is 2.072 per cent while the annual rate of food production is only 2.4 per cent. If food production levels do not increase, food shortages will become more acute in the near future.

Food shortages, from Israel experience, can be solved through a revolution in agriculture.

The Government's initiatives for improving agriculture such as 'Agriculture first', in the 2009/2010 fiscal budget could be the right approach to achieve self-sufficiency.

As Israeli farmers and scientists have had to cope with a difficult environment and limited water resources, their experience is relevant to Tanzania.

Israel's success lies in the determination of farmers and scientists' demonstration to the world that the real value of land is a function of how it is utilised.

According to the Director of business development at Rotem industrial park, Men Maor, Israel is willing to share its expertise with developing nations such as Tanzania through its Centre for International Cooperation.

The fields of expertise include water resource management and irrigation, water security, desert agriculture and how to combat desertification, emergency and disaster medicine.

The irony in Israel is that, in the middle of the deserts, there is massive agricultural greenery supported by state of the art irrigation technology.

The one and a half hour drive from Ashdod to Dimona is a big and wonderful irony, for, the desert stretch has significant distances of successful farms, and all green under irrigation technology.

Currently, in Israel, the total average annual potential of renewable water amounts to some 1,800 MCM, of which about 95 per cent is already exploited and used for domestic consumption and irrigation.

About 80 per cent of the water potential is in the north of the country and only 20 per cent in the south.

Israel's main freshwater resources are: Lake Kinneret - the Sea of Galilee, the Coastal Aquifer - along the coastal plain of the Mediterranean Sea, and the Mountain Aquifer - under the central north-south (Carmel) mountain range.

This shortage of 2 billion people around the world lacking access to sufficient quantities of water could worsen due to the rise of world's population and to the redistribution of water resources among the world's regions, which in turn stems from global warming.

Lior Konitzki, head of technology Industries Division, said the country's vibrant environmental technology sector has been supported by innovative research and development carried out by leading academic institutions, technological incubators, and the private sector.

"Others are national policies like the NEWTech program- Noval Efficient Water Technologies - adopted by the Government, which have accelerated the development of new technologies in this realm," said he, adding that implementation of dedicated technologies have it possible for the country to produce 25 per cent of the country's water requirement. There are also expectations that Israel will be able to produce 40 per cent of its water demand within 5 years.

Israel succeeds to recycle almost 75 percent of its wastewater and to deliver the decontaminated water to arid regions for irrigation, in place of artesian water suitable for human consumption and industrial use.

Lately the construction of several large desalination plants started in Israel, aimed at preventing long-running water deficit, with the first plant already operational in the city of Ashkelon.

Its 100 million m3 per year capacity makes it the world's largest plant using the RO technology. In total, about 350 million m3 of water per year will be desalinated in Israel.

Desalination, the removal of salts from ocean water to make it fit for human consumption is done at the plant.

In an interview with The Citizen, Israeli ambassador to East Africa, Mr Jacob Keidar, said Agriculture minister Steven Wassira visited Israel in May this year, where a lot of future cooperation was planned to issues related to irrigation, and small farmers developing kits through accessing funds from micro finance institutions.