CAIRO: Egyptian and World Bank officials lent their signatures to a project aiming to reclaim farmland, save groundwater, improve growing techniques and institutionalize water management in the West Delta region, the bank announced Monday. Speaking to local press, the Egyptian Minister of International Cooperation Fayza Aboul Naga said the project should reclaim 170,000 feddans of arable land and eventually benefit up to 15 percent of Egyptians. The World Bank devised the project in June 2007 and is scheduled to lend Egyptian developers a total of $145 million over four years, according to the international group s planning documents. Under the original timetable, the first $30 million was to be delivered this year, $80 million next year, another $30 million in 2010, and the final $5 million in the project s final year. That guess was optimistic, sources at the World Bank s local office said, and it will likely take several more months for the plan to wind through parliamentary debates and other approval steps. Design for the first stage of the project - which includes building surface water irrigation and connection systems - may start early in 2009, with construction opening several months later, sources at the office said. Recent food shortages alongside soaring prices for rice and other staples have made agriculture a nexus of conflict between developing and developed states in recent months. Nations as diverse as Egypt, India and the Ukraine have flouted international pleas for open trade by imposing quotas or bans on their rice exports as they have tried to cool domestic prices. Alongside drought, demand for corn-based ethanol fuels, and growing hunger for meat among the world s burgeoning middle classes - livestock usually needs more field space per pound of food than staples like wheat or rice - inefficient farming and poor water distribution have garnered a great deal of blame for the recent troubles. Egyptian agriculture, often concentrated in small subsistence farms, was no exception. This loan is the World Bank s seventh to the Ministry of Irrigation since the Bank started sponsoring projects here in areas such as land drainage, pumping and irrigation in the 1970s.
