CAIRO - “Egypt has lost LE5.7 billion in Toshka [in Egypt's southernmost desert] project,” declared the Central Auditing Agency (CAA) in a recently released report. In 1997, the Egyptian Government decided to develop new desert projects, where agricultural and industrial communities could be developed, of which the Toshka mega-development project was the most vaunted. It was much favoured and visited in the early years of its development by former President Hosni Mubarak. “While the feddan [acre] costs LE16,000, the investors have bought it in return for only LE50 per feddan,” read the report. “Moreover, the Government sustained the infrastructure's expenses, including the main canals, the industrial and engineering works. The establishment of the infrastructure cost LE16,000 per feddan,” stated the agency. “Worse still, less than 3.6 per cent of the specified land ��" 243,000 feddans ��" have been cultivated,” it revealed. “For example, the Kingdom Agricultural Development Company, owned by the Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, has cultivated only one per cent of the 100,000 feddans it had claimed in the project.” “Astonishingly, a feasibility study of the project was only prepared in May 1998, about 17 months after establishing of the project,” the report further disclosed. The Toshka Project basically comprised building a system of canals to carry water from Lake Nasser to irrigate the sandy waste of the Western Desert of Egypt, which is part of the Sahara Desert and also known as the Libyan Desert. The Toshka Project was intended to primarily be an agricultural and horticultural delta to lure the Egyptian away from the centuries- old Nile Valley.
