Top basins by irrigation efficiency — Highest return per cubic meter of water.

Overview

The top of the ranking is highly concentrated. The Netherlands is the clear outlier at 21.53 USD/m³, followed by Slovenia at 9.70 and Switzerland at 6.04. After the first three rows, values fall quickly: the fourth-ranked entry, New Zealand, is 4.52 USD/m³, and the tenth-ranked entry, Montenegro, is 3.91 USD/m³.

The list is not a ranking of farm income, total agricultural production or physical irrigation efficiency. It is an economic water-productivity indicator. A high value can reflect high-value agricultural output, crop mix, prices, limited measured agricultural water use or the way national accounts and water-use estimates are combined.

The corrected version does not use overall SDG 6.4.1 values as substitutes for missing agriculture values. If a country or area has a blank agriculture component in the official source table, it is not included in this Top 100 agriculture-component ranking.

Top 10 countries and areas by agriculture water-use efficiency

The Top 10 ranges from 21.53 USD/m³ in the Netherlands to 3.91 USD/m³ in Montenegro. All values below are official 2022 agriculture-component values from the SDG 6 Data Portal / FAO AQUASTAT source table.

Unit: U.S. dollars per cubic metre. Direction: higher is better. Ties are ordered alphabetically when values are the same after source display rounding.

Methodology

The metric is the agriculture, forestry and fishing component of SDG indicator 6.4.1, expressed as U.S. dollars per cubic metre. SDG 6.4.1 measures water-use efficiency as the ratio of dollar value added to the volume of water used. This page ranks only the agriculture component, not the overall economy-wide indicator.

The target year is 2022 because the SDG 6 Data Portal source table lists 2022 as the latest reporting year for the country and area data used here. The 2026 label is a publication snapshot based on the latest available official source-year table. It is not a 2026 estimate and not a forecast.

No modeled projections are included. No missing values are backfilled. No country receives an overall SDG 6.4.1 value as a substitute for a missing agriculture value. This prevents mixing economy-wide values with agriculture-component values.

The main limitation is comparability. A high value can reflect crop mix, agricultural prices, greenhouse or high-value production, limited measured water use, denominator effects or national-accounting treatment. A low value can reflect water-intensive crops, low producer prices, large irrigation withdrawals or data-quality constraints. The metric does not directly measure farm profit, food security, canal leakage, groundwater depletion, drought exposure, irrigation technology quality or equity of water access.

Full ranking: Top 100 countries and areas by agriculture water-use efficiency

Use the controls to search, filter or sort the ranking while keeping the same official 2022 source values. The table includes exactly 100 confirmed country and area rows.

Table note: the ranking uses only official 2022 agriculture, forestry and fishing component values from SDG indicator 6.4.1. Value bands are display filters only: Very high ≥1.50, High 0.70–1.49, Medium 0.30–0.69, Low <0.30 USD/m³.

Insights from the ranking

What it means

For policy readers, this ranking helps identify where agriculture generates more reported economic value per unit of water used. It can support questions about water allocation, crop strategy, irrigation modernization, pricing, monitoring and climate adaptation.

For investors and agricultural planners, a high value can point to markets where agricultural water supports high-value production. It should not be used alone to judge farm profitability because the indicator does not include capital costs, labour costs, land prices, subsidies, energy costs or farm-level margins.

For general readers, the practical lesson is that “more value per cubic metre” is not only about irrigation equipment. It is also about what is grown, how products are priced, how agricultural value added is measured and how reliably water use is separated by sector.

FAQ

Sources