Waiting for biggest middle east war

There are many sensitive issues in Egypt, with one of the most sensitive of all being the issue of water. Egypt is the gift of the Nile, as Herodotus tells us. What he said sounds all too sweet, even romantic. But the reality is starkly different. Egypt is very jealous of its Nile water quota for the simple reason that its population is 

constantly growing. At the same time, the populations of the other Nile Basin countries are growing too. Everyone needs water. This week, Pete Willows and Hugh Nicol take a closer look at a problem which, we must all admit, won’t be suddenly disappearing any time soon.

Egypt and Sudan dominate contemporary Nile Basin water allocation policy. This is partly because both nations are signatory to the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement (NWA), which apportions the river’s water flow between the two countries. 


   From a macro-economic perspective, Egypt’s economy dwarfs all other Nile Basin nations in terms of Gross National Income (GNI): with Ethiopia at only $100 per capita, Egypt crests at over fourteen times that amount, around $1,490 per capita. Sudan’s livestock population also prevails among riparian nations.

The Nile Waters Agreement

   Out of a total of 84 billion cubic metres (b m3) of water flow per annum, Egypt gets 55.5b m3 and Sudan gets 18.5b m3. An estimated 10b m3 is lost to evaporation from the Aswan Dam reservoir on the Egypt-Sudan border. Every day, 300 million cubic metres of water is discharged into the Mediterranean.

The Nile Basin Initiative

   The NBI is a programme by organisation of the countries in the Nile Basin, which is intended to co-operatively manage and negotiate water policy in this region. The NBI member nations are:

1. Burundi
2. DR Congo
3. Egypt
4. Ethiopia
5. Kenya
6. Rwanda
7. Sudan 
8. Tanzania
9. Uganda
10. Eritrea (in an observing capacity)

Nile water resource management

   The media are fond of portraying the issues at stake in Nile Basin water management as potential for outright warfare among the NBI nations, and this is often presented in apposition with ongoing international petroleum conflicts. 
   However, both recent data and historical relations between NBI nations present a comparatively co-operative and stable relationship on Nile water management issues.
Analysis of water management issues requires hard data regarding:
1. Need. Generally, a threshold of 1,000 m3 is needed per capita, per annum.
2. Growth. Substantial population growth has encouraged groundwater abstraction. More than 5 per cent of water used in Egypt is groundwater. In Sudan, groundwater is drawn from aquifers beneath wadi beds, like the Gash, Howare and Nyala. These are essential sources of water for small rural communities, but will not provide Basin-wide solutions for larger sectors like livestock and agriculture.
3. Food production. Egypt no longer relies exclusively on water resources in combination with farming to produce food and instead imports significant quantities of food. This is considered to be ‘virtual water’ in an abstract perception of water consumption. 
   Al-Ahram Weekly wrote in early June 2009 that the per capita share of water in Egypt has fallen to 750 m3 per annum. The water poverty line is recognised at 1,000 m3 of water per capita. By 2017, it is expected this figure for Egypt will plummet to 582 m3. Comparatively, Canada’s water consumption was at 1,494 m3 in 2000, while the United States, the highest in the world, was over 1,680 m3.

The year 2050

   The collective population of the Nile Basin nations is today estimated at some 300 million persons. However, the year 2050 is on projection for an alarming increase in these teeming populations. Egypt is very much included in these population growth estimates.
   A 1947 census put Egypt’s population at 19 million. According to the 2006 census conducted by the Egyptian Government’s Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), the population of Egypt had shot up to over 72 million, with a growth rate of 2 per cent per annum in the past decade. 
   Today, the population is estimated at 80 million. In about 60 years, Egypt’s population has more than quadrupled. According to the projections, Egypt’s population could reach over 120 million by 2050.
   There has been a similar trend in Sudan, where the population climbed from 9 million in 1950 to 39 million in 2007, a more than fourfold increase. Population growth Sudan is at about 2.15 per cent. Sudan’s population is projected to reach 73 million by 2050.
   In Ethiopia, the population is already large at 83 million, but it could well reach 183 million by 2050, if current trends continue.

Co-operation among riparian nations

   The 1990s saw the beginning of a positive co-operative initiative among the riparian nations in the Nile Basin. This marks the third of three significant eras in the last 150 years of Nile water management.
1. Late 19th Century to the 1950s (when Africa began to break from colonial rule): Nile Basin water management was entirely dominated by European socio-economic policy.
2. World War II to the late 1980s: departure from colonialism to independent rule led to state ideologies and policies having been heavily influenced by Cold War partisan politics. This era saw many newly independent states exerting nationalist bravado.
3. The late 1980s onwards: distillation of world dominance into one superpower engendered an economic shift in the Nile Basin states to a more open, free-market economic agenda. It was in this era that the NBI emerged, as the independent states began to seek self-resolution to regional disputes and issues.

Geography of the Nile Basin

   In The River War, published in 1902, Winston Churchill wrote the following:
"The north-eastern quarter of the continent of Africa is drained and watered by the Nile. Among and about the headstreams and tributaries of this mighty river lie the wide and fertile provinces of the Egyptian Soudan. Situated in the very centre of the land, these remote regions are on every side divided from the seas by five hundred miles of mountain, swamp or desert.
   "The great river is their only means of growth, their only channel of progress. It is by the Nile alone that their commerce can reach the outer markets, or European civilisation can penetrate the inner darkness. The Soudan is joined to Egypt by the Nile, as a diver is connected with the surface by his air-pipe. Without it there is only suffocation. Aut Nilus, aut nihil!"
   The Nile is generally regarded as the longest river in the world. The Blue Nile flows from Lake Tana in Ethiopia, and the White Nile flows from Lake Victoria in Uganda. 
They meet in Khartoum at Al-Morgan (‘The Confluence’) to form the Nile proper. There are other tributaries, like the Atbara River, which runs seasonally from Ethiopia to join the Nile proper, north of Khartoum.
   As for geographic diversity in the Nile Basin, add the following to Churchill’s poetic narrative: highlands in the Ethiopian Plateau, lush African Savannah, snow-capped mountains, tropical vegetation, pastoral plains in Sudan, rainforest below the Tropic of Cancer and the sparse, lunar, solitary beauty of the Sahara Desert above. 
   One of the more dramatic environmental features of the Nile Basin is the wetlands area of the Sudd in South Sudan, one of the largest wetlands in the world, at 30,000 km2.

Swimming upstream

   Egypt has had a historic right to claim the Nile for herself since time immemorial, and continues to militate against diversions in the river’s water flow. But today, upstream, there are domestic concerns in the countries from where the Blue Nile and White Nile flow: Ethiopia and Sudan. 
   Agriculture accounts for 86 per cent of water withdrawal in Ethiopia, and 94 per cent in Sudan. Irrigation has become critical to food security in riparian nations and the Sudanese are claiming they have almost entirely consumed their allocated share of Nile waters.  
   In Egypt 50 per cent of the population is dependent on agriculture, whereas 70 per cent of Sudanese are dependent on agriculture for their livelihood. After the 1959 agreement with Egypt over water-sharing rights, dams were built in Sudan to store water for flood control and irrigation purposes.
   Sudan is currently building new dams for food security and other essential needs like hydroelectric power generators. 
   Egypt vehemently opposes agricultural diversion of water resources upstream, but considers Sudan’s hydropower facilities beneficial, as the dams act as siltation basins, stopping much of the sediment load before it reaches Lake Nasser, while the hydropower stations do not reduce water flow. 
   Additionally, the increase in hydropower would putatively assist Sudan in extracting her groundwater resources.
   Ethiopia, however, poses an immense challenge to Egypt’s water management policy interests. Agriculture represents 40 per cent of Ethiopia’s GNP and 90 per cent of its exports, as well as employing 85 per cent of the population. And Ethiopia’s population is growing faster than Egypt’s. 
   Ethiopia presents a larger and more complicated equation for Egypt’s water nabobs to solve than Sudan. Ethiopia, unlike oil-rich Sudan, cannot simply expend capital to purchase food when food shortages occur. And there have been many well-publicised famines in Ethiopia. 
   Although Egypt opposes water diversion in Ethiopia for irrigation purposes, they have been flexible in allowing hydropower development, as in Sudan, as this is expected to arrest sedimentation.
   The NBI’s progress is due much to its focus on the entire Basin, rather than on the core riparian nations, which has engendered a sort of glasnost, or thawing of relations, between the previously bellicose Basin nations. 
   Much positive development in diplomacy and policy negotiation has emerged. But the NBI modestly considers itself a ‘transitional arrangement until a permanent legal and institutional framework is in place’.
   And the NBI has set neither specific goals nor dates by which to achieve resolution on these pressing water management issues. 
   Further, the NBI’s almost complete dependence on outside funding from organisations like the World Bank, inter alia, for both its inception and operating costs, raises questions about long-term sustainability. Funding for this programme will not be indefinite.

Co-operative Framework Agreement

   Negotiations for a Nile Co-operative Framework Agreement (CFA) started in 1997. After almost a decade, the draft of the CFA was submitted to a meeting of the Nile Council of Ministers for Water Affairs (Nile-COM) for their consideration in June 2007.
   Following extensive discussions, the Nile-COM concluded that the CFA should be passed along to heads of state to resolve sticking points. The signing and ratification of the CFA is today, more than ever before, a critically urgent action necessary for a future of riparian co-operation in the Nile Basin.
   Talks were held in Kinshasa in May 2009, then additional talks in the form of the 17th Nile Council of Ministers Meeting were held in late July 2009 in Alexandria. 
On 28 to 29 September last year, a follow-up meeting was held in Kampala. Dr Mohamed Nasr Eddin Allam, Minister of Water and Irrigation of Egypt and Chairman of the Nile Council of Ministers, opened the first meeting between the members of the Nile Technical Advisory Committee and the negotiators.
   At the time of going to press, there had been no comprehensive agreement reached in these talks.
   At the meeting in Alexandria last summer, Egypt and Sudan threatened to withdraw from the NBI, if their interests were ignored, while signing the CFA. In an interview on July 7 2009 with the Egyptian independent newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, Minister Allam reiterated Egypt’s three demands:
1. Water security
2. Advance notification of projects in the Upper Nile 
3. Veto power for projects in other countries.
Potable water supplies are not expected to increase accordingly, to meet the impending demands of increased livestock, agricultural development and populations on the Nile Basin’s already strained water resources. 
   Recorded trends in rainfall and river flow in Sub-Saharan Africa may have been considered large in the 20th Century, but hydrometeorological studies on this region of the world have data going back for only about one hundred years. 
   And with climate change dramatically disrupting weather patterns, it would be difficult to say with any certainty what future rainfall and river flow patterns will look like. Water management issues cannot remain unresolved, and a water war is certainly in nobody’s best interests.