As Egypt faces some disconcerting implications about water and dams in far off places, experts are refurbishing ideas that could unruffle political feathers as well as start the country on the path to ecological viability. Tawfiq Ali Mansur, a leading expert on water resources, has recently again been suggesting that water from the Nile be stored in the massive depressions in the Western Desert as a way of solving the nation's water problems. As long ago as December 1998, Mansur wrote to the then president, Hosni Mubarak, advising the government to start a project in the Qattara Depression This Depression, Mansur pointed out, could hold an amount of water equivalent to Egypt's annual quota of Nile water for 20 years. If turned into a lake, the economic potential for the country in terms of jobs, agricultural produce, and urban development would be staggering. According to Mansur, the Western Desert is peppered with a string of depressions, some of them long-inhabited oases, that would be capable of providing spectacular greenery in the middle of the isolated desert if they were properly irrigated. Among the best-known inhabited depressions are those of Siwa, Qattara, Natrun, Wade Faregh, Fayyoum, and Rayyan, along with Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla, and Kharga. Their topography follows a regular pattern, with each depression lying at a distance of 50 to 300 km from the next. For example, the depressions of Toshka and Dakhla are situated on the same longitude, while Fayyoum, Rayyan and Kharga are on the same latitude. In their book Point of No Return: The Deadly Struggle for Middle East Peace US political analysts Geoffrey Kemp and Jeremy Pressman argue that increased population density in countries such as Egypt calls for innovative approaches to water resources and agriculture. Mansur's suggestion could be one such approach. However, when considering the suitability of the Western Desert there is the matter of mines to be taken into account. During the Second World War, German and British troops planted millions of mines in the area, many of them still in place today and blocking chances for further development. Egyptian diplomats have brought up the issue with both Berlin and London, but they need to do so again more forcefully as the land is now more than ever needed for peaceful purposes. The storage capacity of the Western Desert depressions, from Toshka all the way north to Qattara, is about 1,200 billion cubic metres. This is almost equivalent to 20 years of Egypt's annual quota of Nile Water, which is 55.5 billion cubic metres. Toshka is only one among several such possibilities, and it already proved crucial in 1998 when the country experienced one of the highest floods in recorded history and nearly 12 billion cubic metres of water were diverted into the Depression. However, the Qattara project has been on the drawing board for 50 years or more now. In 1958, I recall interviewing Mahmoud Shoqeiri, one of the engineers who worked on the project at the time. Showing me detailed maps of hydropower stations, he explained the possible economic benefits from the lake that would result from flooding the area. One can only imagine what the present situation would be like had we started filling the lake back then. There are other examples of how the judicial use of the water resources of a given region can bring together nations and open up new possibilities, instead of triggering animosity and confrontation. The basin of the Zambezi River is shared by eight African countries, for example, and with the help of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) these countries signed the Zambezi Action Plan in 1987, ensuring that the future development of the River would bring sustainable advantages to all. Egypt's neighbours are not much different from the nations that cooperated in the Zambezi project. In the summer of 2010, The Chadian president visited the area of East Oweinat, a massive region in southwest Egypt that is billed for extensive agricultural development using aquifer water. Chad and Oweinat are possibly linked by ground water, which means that ecological cooperation is in order. The Oweinat people also have an interesting story to tell. When I visited Oweinat some years ago, I was told that the region had originally been marked out for oil development but during the prospecting work by an international oil company the bore holes that were supposed to yield oil produced water instead. As the water then flowed to the surface, the inhabitants were able to use it to establish a farm, which they dubbed the Barquqi Farm after the manager of the oil company that brought them this unexpected bonus. Water expert Amin Rezq also wants to build a 400-mile canal to link the Congo River with the Nile. If completed, the project could provide both Egypt and Sudan with 95 billion cubic metres of water, enough to irrigate 80 million feddans of land and generate 18,000 megawatts of electricity, nearly ten times the capacity of the Aswan High Dam. Experts estimate the initial cost of the project at LE10 billion. Arguments over the proposed Ethiopian dam on the Nile have stirred much ire in Egypt, but it may be just the opportunity we need to start new thinking on ideas that could befit the age we live in and inject renewed vitality into the economy.
