Sara Abou Bakr speaks to the head of Greenpeace's first ever delegation to Egypt "Egypt enjoys a strategic location," says Wael Hmaidan, a 29-year-old campaigner from Greenpeace Mediterranean and head of the three- person delegation currently visiting Egypt. So strategic, in fact, that Hmaidan hopes Egypt will become the springboard for Greenpeace's future environmental campaigns in the Middle East and North Africa. Greenpeace is one of the world's best-known non-profit organisations which has been campaigning against environmental degradation since it was founded in 1971. Regularly, the organisation dispatches activists to different countries as part of its ongoing re-evaluation of environmental and peace campaigns. And this year the group's Mediterranean office has chosen to research Egypt as a potential country where it can launch three major campaigns tackling climate change, the ecology of the Mediterranean Sea, and nuclear disarmament. "Egypt can play an important role, not least because two of our three campaigns are about issues that directly impact on the Egyptian economy," says Hmaidan. Global warming, caused by the emission of harmful gases, and the consequent melting of the polar ice caps, leaves large areas of the Nile delta vulnerable to flooding. "It is in Egypt's long-term economic interest to lobby for the use of clean energy," says Hmaidan, who hopes Egypt will lend its support to Greenpeace's campaign for investment in solar energy across North Africa. He also hopes Egypt will support the group's campaign to end over- fishing and waste dumping in the Mediterranean. "We are seeking to establish marine reserves in the Mediterranean where fishing will be totally prohibited. Research shows that in as short a time as five years marine reserves lead to significant increases in fish stocks." The delegation plans to tour most of Egypt, visiting the Red Sea, the Nile Delta and the North Coast. They have scheduled meetings with government officials and with other non-profit organisations with the aim of assessing how much support they might be able to count on and how much red tape they will face. "We are here, basically, to see whether Greenpeace will be able to work in Egypt," says Hmaidan. "And hopefully we will." The delegation's first meeting in Egypt was with 40 Egyptian cyberactivists who were briefed on Greenpeace's new environmental campaigns. Greenpeace has a global network of cyberactivists; they are, Hmaidan argues, "a very effective tool for the exercise of global pressure on corporations and governments". It was this network that, in 2003, allowed Greenpeace to mobilise 30 million people to protest against the Iraq War. Unlike other environmental organisations Greenpeace, determined to keep its programme free of hidden political agendas, refuses donations from governmental bodies. But is environmental activism, which is, after all, a relatively foreign concept to Egyptians, likely to take off in a country where the majority of people, battling against poverty, are likely to view environmental issues as a luxury they cannot afford? "Protecting the environment," says Hmaidan, "is no longer a luxury. It is a necessity, something we cannot afford to ignore. We are not just talking about planting trees and saving animals. We are concerned about the delicate environmental balance. The social, economic and environmental [dimensions] are intertwined. They cannot exist without one another."
