CAIRO: The director of Egypt's Institute of Agricultural Economic Department at the Agricultural Research Center, Fawzi al-Shazly, said that the country's food gap is at around 40 percent and this proportion is expected to increase in the near future as a result of the continued growth of the population. He said that statistics show that by 2017, Egypt will be home to 95 million people and by 2025 that number will increase to around 125 million at current rates. This will result in major shortages of fresh water in the country, he said at a symposium organized last week by the research center. “There are threats from the anticipated climate change and its negative impacts on agricultural productivity and total production and the potential shortage of fresh water in Egypt,” Shazly argued. “The most important challenges facing the agricultural sector in Egypt is currently the low volume of investments in the agricultural sector, which prevents the achievement of the objectives of the agricultural strategy for Egypt by 2030 as well as the lack of adequate funding and the need to develop the political credit for financial institutions operating in the agricultural sector in Egypt,” the director said in his comments at the conference. For his part, Lotfy Nasr, a professor at the Institute for Water Management Research stressed that Egypt is “part of a group of the 14 poorest in water resources, where the per capita in Egypt is not to exceed 750 cubic meters per year, though the water poverty line is 1000 cubic meters.” He continued to say that after assessing the share of water for citizens in the world, “Egypt is facing a water crisis already.” He said that “there is no comparison between the share of its citizens from other countries of the world, especially in North America, Europe and East Asia and many African countries.” Nasr added that agriculture consumes about 80 percent of Egypt's water resources, including fresh water, “making the cost criterion to establish strategies for agricultural crops requires knowledge of the most expensive water and the reduction in cultivation … and also livestock water cost is high, followed by some agricultural crops, mainly rice and sugar cane, and the decreasing water consumed in the production of vegetables, fruits, legumes and grains such as corn, wheat and beans” must be sought by the country in order to deal with climate change and the expanding population. Egypt has been the center of much climate change talk recently, as the environment ministry has repeatedly said the risk of flooding in the Nile Delta could see much of the agricultural land submerged by the end of the century if actions are not taken immediately. BM
