Whether Egypt decides to resort to international arbitration, diplomatic manoeuvres or even military action in response to Ethiopia's decision to go ahead with building its so-called Renaissance Dam on the River Nile, any move could still be met by a long list of economic losses. Ethiopia, the source of one of the two tributaries of the Nile, last week started diverting the river's flow to make way for its $4.2 billion hydroelectric power project, the Renaissance Dam. With a safety coefficient as low as 1.5, compared to eight in the case of the Aswan High Dam, one main concern about the new dam is its low safety standards, with some experts believing that it could collapse within 25 years of its inauguration. The reservoir behind the dam will hold 74 billion cubic metres of water, which means that a collapse of the dam would flood major cities, among them Khartoum in Sudan, and would have drastic effects on Egypt. However, there are not only safety concerns. Were the new dam to be built as planned, the amount of water Egypt receives from the River Nile would sharply decrease, this despite a series of agreements, one of which dates back to the 1920s, giving Egypt the right to 55 billion cubic metres of Nile water annually, in addition to veto rights over upstream developments that might affect the river's flow. While other countries are considered to be suffering from water poverty when the per capita share of water is 1,000 cubic metres annually, the figure for Egypt is currently 700 cubic metres, meaning that the country is in a perilous water situation. According to a report by a committee of water, agriculture and irrigation experts to assess the impact of the Renaissance Dam on Egypt, Egypt's share of Nile water would decrease by 20 per cent and the power it generates from water would decrease by 40 per cent were the dam to be completed. A main problem would be during the period when the new dam's reservoir was filling, which would take six years starting from 2014. According to the experts' report, Egypt's share of Nile water would decrease by between 20 and 38 per cent annually during this six-year period, depending on the flow of the Nile each year. This means that in the worst-case scenario water going to Egypt would be reduced by some 19 billion cubic metres. According to the report, each one billion cubic metres lost would mean transferring one million feddans of fertile land to non-arable uses and would strip the country's agricultural production by 12 per cent of its volume and increase Egypt's food gap by LE5.1 billion a year. Egypt's overall cultivated land is 8.5 million feddans. “These assessments are based on the assumption that the dam will be used only for power generation. The losses would be even larger if it were used for irrigation as well,” said Medhat Enebar, a professor of economics at the Centre for Agricultural Studies. “There has been no agreement governing the use of this dam, so there is nothing that prevents Ethiopia from using its water for any project,” he added. Enebar said that there would be adverse effects of the reduced flow of the Nile on the environment, with increased pollution and increases in salinity threatening fish and plants. Damming such a huge amount of water behind the dam's reservoir would also increase the amount of evaporated water by 0.5 per cent. “This is not a small problem, since only some five per cent of the river's water is currently utilised, while the rest is wasted,” Enebar said. “Ethiopia's signing an international agreement guaranteeing Egypt's and Sudan's quotas of Nile water is a must before both countries can approve the building of the new dam,” wrote Ahmed Al-Naggar, head of the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies in Al-Ahram. “If such an agreement is not signed, giving the go-ahead to this project would be political insanity that would tempt Ethiopia to further violation of the two states' water rights.” According to Enebar, while Egypt is signatory to the 15 agreements relating to Nile water rights, none of these is specifically related to the new Ethiopian dam. For this reason, Egypt must insist on Addis Ababa's signing an agreement sponsored by the United Nations guaranteeing Egypt's and Sudan's shares in the Nile water, he said. Al-Naggar said that under international law if the water of any river passes through a country where the lives of people, cattle and plants are dependent on it, this gives that country the right to have this water. If an agreement can be signed with Ethiopia over the new dam, Al-Naggar said that the three countries should then negotiate the possibility of reducing the capacity of the dam's reservoir to 55 billion cubic metres in order to limit the amount of water needed to fill it. He also suggested extending the period for filling the reservoir to 10 to 15 years so that the annual withdrawal of Nile water would be more limited. He also stressed the importance of cooperation between Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan in building the dam as a means to limit the involvement of other countries, some of them having possible political differences with Egypt. Some reports have noted that some of the experts involved in the construction of the dam, as well as a percentage of the investments used, are Israeli. Looking for ways to maximise the utilisation of its current water resources is now a matter of life or death for Egypt, said Enebar. “We should reactivate the Jongeli Canal project, which would increase the volume of water coming from the southwestern tributaries of the river in Sudan by digging a canal bypassing the swamps where most of this water is being wasted.” “This project would provide Egypt and Sudan with seven billion cubic metres of irrigation water annually,” he said. Construction work on the canal started decades ago, but came to a halt due to political instability in Sudan. Enebar also pointed to a project currently underway in two governorates in the Delta region and another three in Upper Egypt to limit wasted water by developing surface irrigation methods. The current system, depending on gravity to ensure water flow, is wasteful, Enebar said. “Under the new systems now being used up to 20 per cent of the water can be saved.”
