Troubled Waters-Egypt and Ethiopia are at loggerheads over a plan to dam the
Nile River.
By Keith Johnson
12/03/2014
Egypt's musical-chairs government
<
http://mideastafrica.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/02/19/the_sinai_war_escal
ates> faces enough
<
http://ethioforum.org/articles/2014/02/21/sisis_gas_pains> challenges. So
why is a construction project almost 1,800 miles from Cairo provoking fears
over Egypt's national survival? Egypt and Ethiopia are butting heads over
the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, a $4 billion
<
http://www.salini-impregilo.com/en/projects/in-progress/dams-hydroelectric-
plants-hydraulic-works/grand-ethiopian-renaissance-dam-project.html>
hydroelectric project that Ethiopia is building on the headwaters of the
Blue Nile, near the border between Ethiopia and Sudan.
Egypt and Ethiopia are at loggerheads over a plan to dam the Nile River.
Cairo worries that the megaproject, which began construction in
2011 and is scheduled to be finished by 2017, could choke the downstream
flow of the Nile River right at a time when it expects its needs for fresh
water to increase. Brandishing a pair of colonial-era treaties, Egypt argues
that the Nile's waters largely belong to it and that it has veto power over
dams and other upstream projects.
Ethiopia, for its part, sees a chance to finally take advantage of the
world's longest river, and says that the 6,000 megawatts of electricity the
dam will produce will be a key spur to maintaining Africa's highest economic
growth rate and for growth in energy-starved neighbors. The hydroelectric
plant will provide triple the amount of electricity generating capacity in
all of Ethiopia today. But the spat threatens to poison relations between
two of Africa's biggest countries.
"The construction of [the dam] could propel a new era of regional
cooperation, but past history suggests it will more likely result in
continued sniping between Egypt and Ethiopia," David Shinn, a former U.S.
ambassador to Ethiopia, told Foreign Policy.
The dispute has heated up again, after a fresh effort to iron out the
differences at the negotiating table collapsed. Egypt has sought to get the
United Nations to
<
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/01/egypt-renaissance-dam-dis
pute-internationalize.html> intervene, and
<
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/5479/17/Sticking-points.aspx> reportedly
asked Ethiopia to halt construction on the dam until the two sides can work
out an agreement, which Ethiopian officials rebuffed.
"The upper riparian states have the right to use the Nile for their
development as far as it doesn't cause any significant harm on the lower
riparian countries, and that is why Ethiopia is building the Grand Ethiopian
Renaissance Dam," Ethiopian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Dina Mufti
<
http://www.zegabi.com/articles/?p=7561> told reporters in late February.
A former Egyptian irrigation minister
<
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/95978/Egypt/Politics-/Exirriga
tion-minister-believes-Egypt-not-proactive.aspx> said March 5th that Egypt
is doing too little to forestall the dam, and highlighted the risks to the
country's water supply. Italy's ambassador to Egypt has
<
http://nazret.com/blog/index.php/2014/03/03/italy-voices-willingness-to-med
iate> reportedly offered Italian help in mediating the showdown; an Italian
firm is constructing the dam.
The dam has been a glimmer in Ethiopia's eye since U.S. scientists surveyed
the site in the 1950s. A lack of cash and Egypt's strength forestalled any
development - but that appears to have changed in the wake of the Arab
Spring and Egypt's three years of domestic political upheaval.
For most of the twentieth century, Egypt and Sudan divvied up the Nile's
water between them. A 1929 treaty with British African colonial possessions
gave Egypt the right to more than half the river's flow; a 1959 treaty upped
Egypt's share to about 66%. The rest was allocated to Sudan -
while Ethiopia, whose highlands are the fount of most of the Nile's waters,
was excluded from discussions.
"It is only Egypt and the Republic of Sudan that consider the 1929 and 1959
agreements as legally binding on all the Nile River riparian states," John
Mbaku of the Brookings Institute Africa Growth Initiative, told FP.
"The Ethiopians may have undertaken what appears to be unilateral action
because of Cairo's unwillingness to join other riparian states in
renegotiating" those accords, he said.
Ethiopia began pushing back seriously after concluding its own water rights
deal with other upstream nations, such as Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, in
2010. The protests in Egypt, the collapse of the Mubarak regime, and Egypt's
three years of domestic turmoil provided a key opening for Ethiopia. It laid
the first stone on the construction project in the spring of
2011 and says the dam is now about one-third complete.
"With all of the chaos in Egypt, Ethiopia caught a break. It has clearly
benefited from the distractions of the government in Cairo," Shinn said. In
2012, Sudan threw its weight behind the project, driving a wedge between the
two downstream users of the river and complicating Cairo's hopes to block
construction.
The dispute over the Blue Nile dam is hardly the only case of water-driven
tensions. Chinese control over the headwaters of major rivers in Asia, and
ambitious plans for hydroelectric development, has sparked concern among a
dozen downstream neighboring countries. Brazil and Paraguay locked horns for
years over the massive Itaipu dam. Even Western U.S. states are squabbling
over water rights to the dwindling Colorado River, especially important now
that the region suffers a prolonged drought.
But Egypt sees the Ethiopian project as an existential threat. A government
<
http://www.sis.gov.eg/Newvr/african_perspective/EN/afrper37/04.pdf> study
concluded, "Water security is the gravest threat facing post-revolution
Egypt." Former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi
<
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2013/06/201361144413214749.html> vowed
last summer that Egypt would not lose "one drop" of Nile water to the
Ethiopian dam, proclaiming, "Our blood is the alternative." Egyptian
politicians were caught on camera last June urging Morsi to back armed
rebels to sabotage the dam's construction. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Egypt's
putative next president, warned Ethiopia last summer the country might
resort to military action to stop the dam, and earlier this month he
<
http://mebriefing.com/?p=509> discussed the dam's threats in a visit with
Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Egypt's fears stem from the dam's possible impacts on the Nile as it flows
downstream through Sudan and eventually to the Mediterranean. The Nile
provides both water for Egyptian agriculture, and also electricity through
Egypt's own Aswan dam.
The big problem: There has been no public discussion of the downstream
impacts of the Ethiopian project. An international panel of experts,
including representatives from Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia, presented a
report last summer to the three governments, but it has not been made
public.
Leaks of the report
<
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-03/ethiopian-hydropower-dam-assessmen
t-warns-of-structural-weakness.html> suggested that Egyptian power
generation could indeed suffer - but the lack of clarity muddies the issue
even for water experts, because it is unclear just
<
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2013/0625/Will-Ethiopia-s-grand-new-d
am-steal-Nile-waters-from-Egypt> how quickly Ethiopia might move to fill the
dam's reservoir after construction is finished. Filling it sooner would
definitely choke water flows downstream, but would enable power generation
more quickly; filling it gradually would push back the potential benefits of
the dam for decades. Ethiopia has spoken publicly of filling the dam's
reservoir in five or six years.
"There's a suggestion (in the panel report) that the electricity generation
at the Aswan Dam could be affected quite significantly," Michael Hammond, a
water engineer at the University of Exeter, told FP.
"However, it's inherently uncertain because we don't know whether we'll have
ten wet years or ten dry years during the filling process," he said.
Jennifer Veilleux, a PhD candidate at Orgeon State University who has done
extensive
<
http://www.transboundarywaters.orst.edu/publications/publications/Veilleux_
GLOBAL%20DIALOGUE_V15_GERD.pdf> field work on the impacts of the Blue Nile
dam, notes that Egyptian fretting about the dam's impact on agriculture tend
to focus on poor farmers. But Egypt has used the abundant Nile waters to
become a major exporter of water-thirsty crops, such as cotton, which in
turn has given Egypt the highest level of economic development among all
Nile Basin countries.
"Why does Egypt have the right to use the Nile for economic development, yet
the Ethiopians don't?" she asks.
Received on Wed Mar 12 2014 - 12:57:26 EDT