Nader Noureldeen Mohamed Ramadan

This chapter explains the optimum economic using the precious, costly and nonrenewable desert ground water in different sectors. Egypt is a country suffering from water scarcity where the water share per capita/year does not exceed 600 m, and the total water shortage reached 42 billion cubic meter/year in year 2018. Thus any new discovered ground water especially deep or spring ones will need economic scientific thinking and wise decision for its uses. The first logical choice for the new ground water should be to reduce the current water gap; but in case of adaptation with this water scarcity; the second choice will be to deliver it into the high income sectors such as hotels, tourisms, industry, and finally agriculture sectors. The municipal and domestic sectors will be also in the focus to meet the demands of the new settlements for the next generation. The least economically feasible choice of using the valuable ground water is to use it in agriculture sectors with its low income, where the return back of using unit of water in industrial sector reached tenfold than agricultural sector. Sometime, the lack of enough foreign currency needed to imports the needed essential food obliged the country to uses desert ground water in producing food. Ground water in Egyptian desert is mostly nonrenewable, deep and costly. The uses of delta and valley renewable shallow ground water in irrigates alluvial soils are completely different than using the desert deep and costly and nonrenewable ground water in cultivates desert lands. The feasibility of using desert ground water in agriculture and growing of agronomy crops, fruit trees and vegetable crops is a waste of a valuable and costly natural resource. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Egypt have had negative results for exploiting the ground water in greening desert by planting wheat, barely, forage, vegetables, and fruit crops. In Egypt, most of ground water wells in Cairo-Alexandria desert road farms are exploited and be salinized. Officially, agriculture sectors consumes 62.5 BCM/yr, and shares in Egyptian GDP by only 11.9%, while the industrial sector, consume a little amount of water as low as 2.4 BCM/yr but shares in GDP by 17.1. According to the deep Egyptian water gap, and the valuable of desert water, the uses of ground water in agriculture extension (if necessarily) should be in the north of Egypt where the temperature is moderate, winter rains, high humidity with low water consumptive use. The different between the temperature in the North and South Egypt reached 15 centigrade especially in the summer season. Historically all the successes project of desert reclamation located in North Egypt and no any one single success project locates in warm, dry and low humidity South Egypt. In Egypt’s desert, the water consumptive use in the warm and dry Upper Egypt is almost double of those in the temperate humid North of Egypt with limited valid of crop types that can be cultivated. Organic agriculture, cash crops, export crops and green house agriculture should be considered as a good investment in desert agriculture using ground water in irrigation to maximize both of net profit and the return back of unite of water.

In general, both agriculture and energy have double roles as user and supplier for each other. Agriculture supplies energy by wood, charcoal, vegetable and crop wastes as primary energy. Moreover, it supplies biogas and biofuel with both ethanol and diesel as clean and sustainable energy.

«النيل في العصر البريطاني» كتاب جديد صادر عن المركز القومى للترجمة، يفسر جذور الصراع حول مياه النيل، وكيف استغلت الحكومات الأوروبية خلال فترات السيطرة الاستعمارية على القارة الأفريقية عموما، وفي حوض النهر بشكل خاص، في إدارة تقسيم مناطق نفوذ محددة لسهولة السيطرة عليها، ومن ثم التحكم في مقدرات شعوب حوض النيل.

This chapter discusses the continuous dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia within the last 100 years concerning the use of Nile water and the building of mega dams. The one-sided decision by Ethiopia to construct the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a mega dam, exploited Egyptian circumstances after the January 2011 revolution by announcing the construction of what will be the biggest dam in Africa and one of the ten biggest dams in the world, a dam that will profoundly harm Egypt. With that announcement, and the previous recent history of Ethiopia in aligning some upstream countries against Egypt to sign the Entebbe agreement, in May 2010, a deep dispute has begun between Egypt and Ethiopia. Egypt believes in the use of the total water resources of the Nile Basin, while the upstream countries believe only in using the water stream that flows between the white river banks. The Entebbe agreement, or the “Nile River Basin Cooperation,” which was signed by six upstream countries, was the first step in the current broad breach between Egypt, Ethiopia, and most countries of the White Nile Basin. The Agreement considers that the history of Nile treaties and agreements began in 2010, canceling all former agreements or treaties. Egypt has suggested building on this Agreement by cooperating in collective work to control the huge water losses in the upstream swamps, wetlands, and on the shores of the upstream lakes, a process which could increase the river discharge by another 100 billion cubic meters, to be shared by all the riparian countries. The upstream countries claim absolute territorial sovereignty over the river water and its tributaries, while Egypt seeks absolute territorial integrity, as outlined in the 1997 United Nations (UN) river water law “Convention on the Law of the Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses”, which describes and locates the relationships between riparian countries. Some countries, such as Ethiopia, claim that Egypt prevents them from producing food for their people, while in reality, of the Nile riparian countries, Egypt has the least agricultural land area (3.5 million ha), while Ethiopia has 35 million ha, Tanzania has 50 million ha, Sudan has 83 million ha, and Kenya has 33 million ha. The area under cultivation for biofuel crops in Ethiopia exceeds all of Egypt’s agricultural land by twofold. The policy of some upstream countries has been to turn to biofuel instead of food and to suggest that other countries are doing the same. The Ugandan parliament has called for Egypt to pay for Nile water that Egypt has rights to. All these issues and others will be discussed in this chapter to highlight and confirm the specific water rights that Egypt has in regard to Nile water, and to stress that these water rights should not be affected by any other upstream countries. On the other hand, Egypt can support the upstream Nile Basin countries to achieve their water and hydropower development projects unless these projects cause harm to Egypt and its Nile water share.

Egypt is not plentiful in agriculture resources, whereby the total cultivated land is only 3.6 million ha, and total renewable freshwater is only 62 Billion Cubic Meter (BCM) for 93 million people. The water shortage in Egypt exceeds 30 BCM/year with Egypt’s water share per capita being 674 m/year. This severe shortage of water resources and arable lands in addition to growing population are one of the reasons why Egypt is one of the largest food importers in the world. Egypt is the biggest importer of wheat (12 million tons/year), and fourth importer of maize at 8.5 million tons/year and the seventh biggest importer of edible oils in the world, with a gap, reached 100% of lentil, 70% of broad bean, and 32% of sugar and 60% of red meat, butter, and milk powder. There are several impacts of food and water insecurity and socioeconomic impacts such as the soaring price of food, and small and tiny farm. More than 80% of land tenure and ownership is less than 0.8 ha in addition to very low share land per capita not exceeding 0.14 acres and continuous increase in poverty rate, which reached 27.8% at the end of the year 2016. To deal with this food insecurity, Egypt counts on major reclamation projects for an addition of more than 1 million acres as an extension to the present agricultural land located in North Sinai, at Toshka in the southwest valley and the Oweinat project in the far south of the western desert near the border with Libya. Agriculture related policies in Egypt should be reformed to plan and advance increased food production especially the essential crops such as wheat, maize, sugar, lentils and broad bean, oilseed, and meat and dairy products. Moreover, Egypt should make serious efforts to find new sources of water to combat water shortage, which may include untraditional sources such as desalination of seawater, treated sewage and treated industry water, and reclaimed agricultural drainage water, and also develop and renovate the whole agricultural system.

River dams are generally constructed for several purposes such as: to generate hydropower; storing water for irrigation and for long-term uses during low flooding and drought years; and both for hydropower generation and saving water. The beneficial side effects of the river dams are to control the river destruction power during high flooding years, to prevent the siltation in irrigation canal, and finally to save water from being wasted in the sea. The collective benefits of Aswan High Dam (AHD) are increasing the Egyptian water resource, controlling and regulating floods, protecting Egypt from potential frequent droughts, increasing agriculture productivity, and completely regulating the river water. The benefits also include preventing siltation in the irrigation delivery systems, enhancing the agriculture extension and desert greening, changing the agricultural pattern to intensive and continuous cultivation, and increasing the cultivation area of high water-consuming crops such as rice, sugarcane, sugar beet, and green clover. The AHD dam is also responsible for generating 2.1 MW of clean sustainable and environmental friendly power, improving navigation and enhancing tourism which create Nile cruise ship hotels, transforming/alternating the agricultural pattern toward having more cash and export crops, increasing fishery and fish productions, and saving the Nile water from being wasted in the Mediterranean Sea. The dam also has a lot of positive economic effects that can help in improving some infrastructure issues as well as the quality of drinking water.

Groundwater reportedly provides drinking water to at least 50% of the global population and accounts for 43% of all water used for irrigation. Food production requires the largest quantities of water, with groundwater resources providing more than 40% of all water used globally for irrigated agriculture. According to the Egyptian Ministry of Irrigation and Public Works the annual water resources in Egypt depend mainly on the Nile water (55.5 BCM), 5.5 BCM groundwater, and 1.3 BCM of rain water that falls on the agricultural land in the Delta. Most of the groundwater in Egypt is non-renewable except for the shallow groundwater in the Nile valley and Delta lands and its fringes in addition to some depression sources and oasis like Wadi El-Natrun in the west Delta (the Valley of Sodium salts) and Siwa oasis south of the northwest coast of Mediterranean. The main aquifers are generally formed of granular rocks (sand and gravel) or fissured limestone and rocks. The deep-lying aquifers systems is comprised of the regional Nubian Sandstone aquifer System, occupying much of the area of Egypt. The thickness of the sediments varies from a few hundred meters in the south, to 4,000 m west of Abu Mongar. Carbonate Aquifers occupy at least 50% of Egypt. The Moghra aquifer system has a broad geographical distribution in the region west of the Nile Delta and south of the Qattara depression. The Nile valley and Delta aquifer are the most productive, containing around 200 × 103 million m3 of water that is renewable by seepage from the Nile river irrigation systems. The thickness of this aquifer decreases from 300 m at Sohag Governorate in Upper Egypt to few meters near Great Cairo (Cairo, Giza, and Qalyubia governorates) and also in the south near Aswan. The coastal aquifer lies 35 km from the seashore, 45 km north of Cairo and is recharged mainly from rainwater and from high-pressure water in the Nubian Sandstone aquifer. Rose basement rock has the same characteristics as the Carbonate aquifer but is difficult to explore since it is very deep (1,200–2,000 m depth). The main problem of the Siwa oasis depression is the poor drainage and lack of a drainage outlet, thus causing water logging. The second problem is the shallow and under pressure groundwater that pops up to the ground creating wetlands. In Wadi-El-Natrun depression, the water table depth is almost of 3–5 m but has a high concentration in sodium carbonates and bi-carbonates. This type of composition is completely different in other delta fringes such as in Nubaria (west delta) or in Salhia (east delta) in which it ranges between 30 and 60 m with a medium quality of maximum salinity of 2,000 ppm. Most of these areas in Nubaria or Salhia are irrigated with Nile water through El-Nasr canal in Nubaria and Salhia canal in the east Delta, but the wells of groundwater are stationed as stand-by or alternative resources when Nile irrigation water is not sufficient or in case of a delay in its delivery.