No sooner was the flooding crisis officially over in November than the spectre of a scorching drought presented itself. In the next few months, the country will be bracing for drought, which is expected to affect the majority of the country's 76 provinces. As usual, farmers will be hit hard, with their crops wilting under the scorching sun.

This country, which is one of the world's major food exporters, continues to rely heavily on rainfall, a major factor in the planning and management of irrigation projects and agricultural yields. Any change in rainfall, especially in terms of overall precipitation levels and distribution patterns, carries huge consequences for the farming sector.

Despite having spent huge amounts of taxpayers' money on the problem, the government has consistently failed to achieve an effective system to manage water resources with a view to preserve excess water from the rainy season by storing it in reservoirs for use in the dry months. Failed crops and the dire economic consequences to farmers aside, authorities are expressing alarm over the possibility that limited water supplies may lead to conflict in rural communities between now and the beginning of the rainy season in mid-May.

Based on the frequency of droughts monitored over the past two decades, some experts have predicted that Thailand may now be facing a prolonged water crisis in spite of the fact that the country receives an average rainfall of 1,200mm to 1,600mm annually. With this amount of rainfall, the country is considered a water-surplus country. But the yearly drought has become an emerging problem in recent years mostly because farmers have expanded agricultural activity outside of irrigated zones.

However, there is no way the government can hide one of the most important factors contributing to problems of too much water in the rainy season and too little of it in the dry season. Even though many years have elapsed since these twin problems took on catastrophic proportions, the numerous government agencies charged with managing water resources continue to be bogged down by task duplication and a general lack of coordination.

Ordering drought-relief operations, including cloud seeding and the dispatching of water tankers to the hardest-hit areas, may be a nice gesture, but these measures do precious little to help farmers in these areas avert ruinous damage to their crops.

Thailand should consider itself lucky that the Thaksin administration's plan to squander up to Bt200 billion of taxpayers' money on a grand plan to install a huge water-pipeline network to irrigate farmland throughout the country has been scaled back. Thaksin's original idea was that such a scheme would be an entitlement to farmers to be subsidised by general taxpayers. Farmers would have been given either free use of the water or paid a small fraction of the actual cost of having the water transported to their farm land when and where they need it.

With such a plan in mind, too many farmers have failed to see any need to conserve water and have no incentive to plan crop production more efficiently. Many farmers even ignore repeated warnings by the Irrigation Department about impending drought and go ahead planting crops without any idea as to how to find water to keep them alive, expecting the government to come to their aid if worse comes to worst. But the government can no longer rely on such Band-Aid approaches to water management to deal with what is shaping up to be a long-term crisis.

What the country needs is a comprehensive package that would cover the management of water and water resources, forestry, human settlement, natural resources and environmental protection. All of these activities must be implemented under the framework of river-basin management to ensure coherent planning, policy-making with wide public participation and the implementation of effective water-resources, land-use and flood management.