Rapidly growing Egypt wrestles with water supplies (News Feature)

By Anne-Beatrice Clasmann Jul 20, 2010, 3:06 GMT

Cairo - The muddy Nile flows sluggishly through Cairo, a metropolis crammed with some 18 million people. Egypt's lifeline, the world's longest river supplies more than 95 per cent of the country's water.

So it was not surprising that alarm bells clanged in Cairo in May when Ethiopia and other upstream countries on the White and Blue Nile announced their intention to take a greater share of the water than previously. Particularly Ethiopia, where 86 per cent of the Nile's waters originate, has hydropower and irrigation projects in mind.

Some Egyptians have even begun to think aloud about military action to secure their country's water supply.

Tensions have eased a bit since May. Egypt has wooed some Nile basin countries with favours and promises of development assistance. But it has become clear to the government of President Hosny Mubarak that the problem will not simply go away.

Egyptian water resources and irrigation minister Mohamed Nasreddin Allam and his advisors have been forced to work on new concepts. They have offered some riparian countries help in building wells and irrigation facilities. In return, they want them to abandon plans to raise their Nile water quotas.

At the same time, Egyptians are considering the development of new water sources - even the construction of costly seawater desalination plants such as exist in the rich Arab Gulf states.

Over the long term, however, this will probably be inadequate to provide Egypt's rapidly growing population with water and domestically produced food. So people in the land of the pharaohs must now learn to use available water resources more economically.

'In the future we plan to collect higher fees from operators of hotel facilities planted with greenery and of artificially irrigated golf courses,' Allam said. Egypt's parliament is expected to pass a law on increased fees during the coming legislative period.

Allam said the Egyptian government also wanted to persuade farmers to cultivate less rice, a water-intensive crop.

Foreign specialists who advise Egypt on water-management issues remain sceptical. They say that the country's second-biggest problem after the population explosion - 53 million people lived in Egypt in 1990, and now the number is more than 80 million - is its enormous waste of water.

Some irrigation methods used in Egyptian agriculture are archaic. On top of that come crumbling plumbing and artificially irrigated gardens in new exclusive residential areas on Cairo's outskirts.

A significant increase in water fees will be difficult to enforce. Since the reigns of Cheops and Ramses II, Egyptians have regarded Nile water as a gratis 'gift of God.'