CAIRO – Egypt's Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation Hesham Qandil arrived in Khartoum Wednesday night to hold talks with his Sudanese counterpart Kamal Ali, the official Middle East News Agency reported on Thursday. The aim of the visit is to discuss ways to boost cooperation between the two countries and to tackle issues regarding the Nile Basin countries. Talks will highlight ways to resume dialogue between the upstream and the downstream countries regarding water quotas. The representatives of the basin countries have recently held their 19th meeting in Nairobi, emphasising their keenness on continuous cooperation. Meanwhile, Basin countries will hold an exceptional meeting on 27 and 28 October in Kigali, Rwanda, the Egyptian government has announced. Qandil said the minsterial meeting will be held on the sidelines of third Nile Basin Development Forum. All Basin countries are scheduled to attend the meeting, which will celebrate South Sudan formally becoming the 11th member of the Nile Basin Initiative. In a press statement, Qandil has said that ministers of the Basin countries unanimously agreed to hold the exceptional meeting to discuss the ramifications of the Entebbe agreement, which was signed by six member countries last year, according to Al-Masry Al-Youm. Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya signed the agreement in Uganda, but Egypt and Sudan objected to the fact that it does not include their historical right to Nile water, which was part of the 1959 Nile water bilateral agreement signed with Sudan. In 1959, Egypt was granted the lion's share of Nile water (51 billion cubic meters annually) and Sudan 18 billion cubic meters.
