A serious water crisis between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan

The Nile river: geopolitical problems

British tourism pioneer Thomas Cook all but invented the Nile cruise in the 1870s when he cornered the market on steamer crossings and proceeded to set up hotels in Luxor and Aswan. One hundred and fifty years later, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has made the global fascination with the mystic river a cornerstone of his campaign to fix Egypt’s economy.

Now he just needs the Nile to cooperate.

In recent years, dropping water levels have repeatedly stranded cruises sailing to Upper Egypt’s archaeological treasures, infuriating tourists and devastating boat owners’ bottom lines. Water scarcity has replaced terrorism as the greatest risk to tour operators’ livelihoods.

“The main threat to the tourism season now is the disruption of navigation in the Nile due to shallow water,” said Ahmed Abdel Ghani, a cruise ship owner whose boat has been docked for the second year in a row.

Water levels hit their nadir during the winter months, at the height of tourism season. Many visitors visit Luxor and Aswan and the archaeological sites along the river’s banks by booking cruises in December and January, Abdel Ghani said, most notably during New Year’s celebrations.

But dropping water levels have made many of those sites inaccessible by boat.

“Sometimes a cruise ship will remain stranded in the river for more than three days before the arrival of rescue units to provide tourists with other means of transportation,” Abdel Ghani noted. “For the tourists, a sudden change of program … is disappointing and frustrating. Nile cruises will bear the brunt of such incidents in the coming tourist seasons.”

All too often, visitors end up missing a large part of their tour program since they are unable to access cities such as Kom Ombo and Arment, which cruise ships now have trouble reaching. As a result, the Nile tours become limited to trips to major archaeological sites such as Luxor and Aswan. Disappointed tourists who had to cut short their tours are unlikely to recommend a Nile cruise to their friends.

Cruise line operators such as Ghani incur multiple losses every time navigation is disrupted. They have to secure alternative land transportation for the disgruntled tourists, and running aground risks major damage to a ship’s hull and engine, with huge maintenance and repair costs.

Abdel Ghani estimates the daily loss for cruise ship owners from a disrupted trip at around $5,000. That’s a big hit for a boat carrying about 100 tourists paying an average of $80 per night for a weeklong or 10-day cruise.

Even hard-fought improvements in the country’s safety reputation risk backfiring.

Egypt launched an ad campaign targeting new markets during last year’s soccer World Cup and recently resumed flights with Russia grounded after a deadly Islamic State bombing in 2015. Across Upper Egypt, Abdel Ghani said, tourism sector workers had been looking forward to the recovery. But now they have their doubts.

“Ahead of this year’s tourist season, intensive preparations started on about 90 cruise ships for the New Year's celebrations, and many tourism programs were launched. A high demand was registered for these tours by international tourism partners and agents. Unfortunately, once again, low water levels hindered navigation and most of these tours risked suspension,” Abdel Ghani said. “The specter of water shortage may cause us more losses than before.”

Cruise ship owners aren’t the only ones who rely on the Nile to deliver a steady stream of tourists. Aswan and Luxor also rely on a busy winter season to sustain hotels, restaurants and local markets that sell souvenirs and traditional products.

The tourism sector water needs represent another challenge for the Egyptian government, which plans to attract 20 million tourists a year by 2020. More tourist facilities means more water consumption in the form of golf courses, swimming pools and industrial lakes in tourist-friendly cities.

The situation has attracted the government’s attention. After some 40 cruises between Luxor and Aswan were affected by navigational restrictions during the 2017-18 winter season, Sisi called a meeting of his tourism and water resources ministers. He pledged to develop an “integrated plan to secure Nile River navigation” including “a routine purge of the river bed by dredges, placing guiding signs and restrictions on cruise owners in order to guarantee the highest possible safety for passengers.”

Ironically, the government’s own policies that prioritize agriculture and drinking water over other uses are part of the problem.

Currently, Egypt’s National Water Resources Management Plan proscribes the release of exceptional quantities of water from Lake Nasser for river navigation. Instead, the minimum daily water release set at 75 million cubic meters (almost 20 billion gallons) is distributed to potable water stations throughout the country, with part of it allocated to agricultural lands.

Ever since the Aswan High Dam went into operation in the 1970s, the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation has followed an annual practice known as the “winter closure,” for 40 days between December and February. During this period when irrigation needs are at their lowest, water is trapped in Lake Nasser and canals are emptied out for maintenance and development. As a result, water levels in the Nile and its branches decrease significantly, causing some usually submerged islands to break the surface.

The policy aims to conserve water for the summer months amid the shortage crisis. But it has created its own set of disruptions, stranding boats, exacerbating water pollution and killing fish.

Los países fronterizos 

Hundreds of miles south of Aswan close to the Blue Nile’s source in northwest Ethiopia, farmer Issa, a farmer in his 20s, is much more upbeat about the river’s future.

Residents of his village of timber and palm-leaf huts have always relied on untreated rainwater and mountain runoff for drinking and bathing water. But construction of Africa's biggest hydroelectric power plant near the border with Sudan has sparked dreams of clean water and reliable energy. Once complete, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, or GERD, will flood some 650 square miles of forest, an area about four times the size of Cairo. Ethiopia estimates the dam will generate 6,500 megawatts of electricity and help the country of 110 million people reach middle-income status.

Al-Monitor toured the villages of Bisha, Guba, Teba and Sherkole in the Benishangul-Gumuz region where the dam is located in July 2016. Issa, a farmer whose land was expropriated for the dam project, said he’d heard about job opportunities for local workers and was excited about the prospect of helping build a better future for himself and his community.

A world away in the corridors of power in Addis Ababa, Khartoum and Cairo, diplomats and regional leaders are dealing with a whole different set of concerns as they try to strike a deal on water rights affecting tens of millions of people. Ethiopia's dam aspirations date back to a 1964 feasibility study conducted by the US Bureau of Reclamation, which first identified potential sites. Construction finally began in 2011. Once complete, it will take anywhere from five to 15 years to fill the reservoir of 70 billion cubic meters (18.5 trillion gallons), which is equivalent to the entire annual flow of the Blue Nile at the Sudan border.

The talks are a matter of national security for Egypt, where the vast majority of people live along the banks of the river. Under a 1959 water sharing agreement with Sudan, Egypt is allotted 55.5 billion cubic meters (14.7 trillons gallons) of water annually from the Blue Nile, which accounts for 85% of Egypt's Nile water. (The smaller White Nile tributary joins the Blue Nile in Khartoum.) At the time, Egypt’s population did not exceed 20 million people. Now, that same amount is supposed to meet the water needs of 100 million Egyptians.

Northeastern Africa has been down this path before. During the reign of Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1960s, Egypt turned to the Soviet Union to help build the High Dam at Aswan to better control flooding. Furious at being left out of regional negotiations over water quotas, impoverished Ethiopia began eyeing its own dams. Tensions thawed in the early 1990s, leading to a 1993 framework providing that “each party shall refrain from engaging in any activity related to the Nile waters that may cause appreciable harm to the interests of the other party.”

However, the attempted assassination of President Hosni Mubarak by Egyptian Islamists while he was visiting Addis Ababa in 1995 reignited tensions. In 2001, Addis Ababa announced its intention to establish several development projects on the river as part of its national water strategy. Ethiopia also mobilized upstream countries to fight the quota system, signing a pact with five other African nations in 2010 that allows them to conduct projects along the river without Egypt's prior consent. Plans for the GERD itself were confirmed in April 2011.

Over the past eight years, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia have held numerous technical, political and security meetings to try to reach a deal that would minimize the dam's impact on the downstream nations' water security. Despite the creation of a trilateral committee in 2012, however, tensions remain high, fueling political instability back in Egypt that has only made it harder to reach a compromise.

The dam was one of the issues that fueled popular anger at Mohammed Morsi during his short stint as Egypt's first democratically elected president. Morsi was hammered in the media after Ethiopia began diverting the flow of Blue Nileto make way for the dam in May 2013. When Sisi was elected president in May 2014, he immediately set about trying to calm the public while also working to improve relations with Ethiopia in an ultimately successful bid to rejoin the African Union (AU), which had suspended Egypt in July 2013 following Morsi's ouster (the AU is based in Addis Ababa).

Under Sisi, Egypt has stressed a diplomatic outcome to the crisis. In 2015, Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan signed a Declaration of Principles on the GERD, despite the advice of legal experts who argued against joining a document that allowed Ethiopia to strengthen its legal and international position while not explicitly providing for the respect and protection of Egypt's annual Nile water quota. “Ethiopia accomplished its mission when it signed a declaration of principles that gave it sovereignty [over its land and natural resources],” Ethiopian Foreign Minister Tedros Adhanom told the Ethiopian parliament following a round of negotiations between Addis Ababa and Cairo in 2015. “Egypt,” he added, “did not mention its historical rights of the Nile waters in this declaration.”

Since then, Egyptian frustration with Ethiopia has swelled. Four years since the declaration was signed, none of its 10 clauses — including a requirement to conduct comprehensive technical studies to test the dam's impacts on Egypt and Sudan — have been carried out. Ethiopia even rejected Egypt's demand to delay filling the dam reservoir until the end of the negotiations. The situation remains unchanged even as Egypt's political and security apparatus has taken over from the technical experts, leading to the intervention of the heads of the general intelligence services as a main party in official negotiations for the first time in April 2018.

Back in the Nile Delta, Faqi describes the water shortage as an “epidemic” that is slowly killing Egypt’s millennia-old agricultural tradition. “Our children have left the land and most farmers have sold their property to look for other sources of income,” he said. “If the water shortage continues, there won’t be any agricultural lands left.”

Ayah Aman

Reference:

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