http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/03/15/egypt_ethiopia_at_loggerheads_over_nile_river.html
Egypt, Ethiopia at loggerheads over Nile RiverCairo worries Great Ethiopian
Renaissance Dam, a $4-billion hydroelectric project, could choke the
downstream flow of Nile River.
*By:* Keith Johnson Foreign Policy magazine, Published on Sat Mar 15 2014
The Star Policards: 0 Councillors mentioned in this article
WASHINGTON--Egypt's musical-chairs government faces enough challenges. So
why is a construction project almost 3,000 kilometres from Cairo provoking
fears over Egypt's national survival?
Egypt and Ethiopia are butting heads over the Great Ethiopian Renaissance
Dam, a $4-billion hydroelectric project that Ethiopia is building on the
headwaters of the Blue Nile, near the border between Ethiopia and Sudan.
Cairo worries 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 when it expects its needs for fresh water to increase.
Brandishing a pair of colonial-era treaties, Egypt argues 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 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 neighbours.
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 intervene, and reportedly asked Ethiopia to halt
construction on the dam until the two sides can work out an agreement,
which Ethiopian officials rebuffed.
A former Egyptian irrigation minister said this week 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 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 20th 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 per cent. The rest was allocated to Sudan.
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, said in an
interview.
"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. 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
benefitted from the distractions of the government in Cairo," said David
Shinn, a former U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia.
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.
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 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 how quickly Ethiopia might move to fill the
dam's reservoir after construction is finished.
Filling it sooner would 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.
Jennifer Veilleux, a PhD candidate at Oregon State University who has done
extensive field work on the impacts of the Blue Nile dam, notes that
Egyptian fretting about the dam's impact on agriculture tends 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 Sun Mar 16 2014 - 21:56:02 EDT