The dryness of the Nile (2)

Egyptian civilization emerged more than 5,000 years ago as heavy summer rains in the highlands of East Africa carried vast amounts of high-quality silt to the lower reaches of the Nile. The resulting soil proved particularly fertile, giving birth to a lush green ribbon that snakes through some of the world's driest lands. In a country that receives less than 8 inches of rain along the coast — and almost none at all south of Cairo — the Nile continues to fulfill 90% of Egypt's water needs.

But surging population growth along the Nile compounded by the devastating impact of climate change threatens disaster as more and more people compete for a dwindling resource. Today, Egypt faces an annual water deficit of more than 20 billion cubic meters (5.3 trillion gallons). That's the difference between the amount of water that people, crops and industry need and what’s available from the Nile in addition to limited quantities of groundwater, treated wastewater and desalinated water.

For millennia, the Nile Delta between Cairo and the Mediterranean Sea has been marked by intensive agricultural use. Today, about 86% of Nile water that flows to Egypt is still used to grow food, with the $28 billion agricultural sector accounting for about 12% of the economy. Agriculture is also the cornerstone of food security, as the government relies on its domestic production to avoid overdependence on foreign sources. In a telling sign of the vital national interests at stake, Egypt transferred responsibility for Nile disputes with its African neighbors from the Water and Foreign Affairs ministries into the hands of Egypt's intelligence and security chief in 2010.

Despite being a national priority, the agricultural sector is one of the hardest-hit victims as Egypt runs out of water. Since 1991, employment in the agricultural sector has dropped from 44% to less than 27%, in part due to farmers abandoning their unprofitable lands to look for work elsewhere.

The country's failure to feed its people has transformed the former breadbasket of the Roman Empire into the world's largest wheat importers: The country imported 12.5 million metric tons (13.8 million US tons) of wheat and flour from April 2018 to April 2019 — 50% more than it produced — according to the Foreign Ägricultural Service of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). To make matters worse, farmers are increasingly growing crops in the desert as the country loses fertile land to urbanization. The government is looking at ways to avoid catastrophe, including by encouraging the use of less wasteful but more expensive pressurized irrigation methods, such as drip and sprinkler systems, which account for a little more than 10% of irrigated lands in Egypt (versus 58%-65% in the United States). At the same time, however, government policies also encourage the production of water-intensive cash crops, notablyt cotton.

Faqi’s parched fields are a case study of all that is going wrong as the Nile dries up. His village of al-Hamoul lies in the governorate of Kafr el-Sheikh, the largest rural tract in Egypt’s agricultural heartland. The governorate’s 275,000 cultivated acres have long produced an abundance of field crops and grains, along with fruits and vegetables as well as livestock — a cornucopia made possible by a complex network of canals and pumping stations stretching more than 500 miles from Lake Nasser to the Nile Delta. But the miracle of irrigation is just as often a source of misery for farmers at the end of the line.

“At the beginning of the agricultural season, we sow our seeds and hope to get a suitable share of water or no water rationing,” Faqi said. “Sometimes we try to delay cultivation to reduce pressure on water demand, or to cultivate the land repeatedly. But these solutions are temporary and useless most of the time.”

Without irrigation, desperate farmers are turning to other sources of water, including tapping aquifers and other sources of underground water whose salinity can damage the soil. Others are reusing agricultural drainage water by using small diesel pumps to lift water from ditches and return it to irrigation canals for reuse, increasing the available water supply but potentially contaminating the irrigation network with polluted water.

Damage to the irrigation network was evident on a tour of al-Hamoul last fall. Most canals were almost completely dry, and irrigation machines lay dormant. Idle farmers threatened to turn on one another.

“Sometimes,” Faqi noted, “we fight and argue with the owners of lands that overlook the same irrigation source to take turns in irrigating the lands.”

The government is well aware of the impact on farmers.

“We are distributing the available water to lands,” Ashraf Mohammadi, the undersecretary of the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation in Kafr el-Sheikh, told Al-Monitor. “It is like using one cup of water to hydrate dozens of people.”

“We have reached a point where the available water quantities set the limits for economic development. We have become one of the driest countries in the world.”

In a bid to address the water deficit, the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation recently initiated a set of austerity measures. The 20-year plan aims to rationalize consumption, encourage water reuse and increase the use of desalinated water in coastal cities.

“Reused agricultural drainage water has become an integral part of the water balance in Egypt,” Mohammadi said, “given the impossibility of relying solely on Egypt’s quota of Nile water.”

The ministry has also taken more drastic measures, including ordering farmers to curtail the production of high-yielding but water-intensive cash crops. In January 2018, the area allotted to rice cultivation was reduced from 1.1 million acres to 750,000 acres, devastating the livelihood of Nile Delta families. As a result, the USDA's Cairo bureau forecast rice production to drop to 3.3 million metric tons (3.6 million US tons) in the 12 months through September 2019, down 1 million metric ton (1.1 million US tons) from the 2017-18 estimate.

“The decision deprived me of growing rice this season, and not enough water rations were provided to grow other crops,” Faqi said. “The government decided not to allow us to grow rice, without giving us any instructions regarding other crops we can rely on to preserve land fertility. Many acres turned into fallow lands, and rice cultivation in the governorate is now history.”

The impact of dropping water levels can be felt far beyond the Nile Delta. In the Faiyoum oasis village of al-Gomhouria, 150 miles to the south, large cracks scar the dry earth as thirsty crops wither in the sun.

“The village’s agricultural lands barely produce enough to cover our consumption needs,” Shaaban Abdul Rahman, a farmer in his early 40s, told Al-Monitor on a recent visit. “We had warehouses for all kinds of grains grown in our land, and now we have to travel to nearby centers to buy our food needs.”

Abdul Rahman recalled when his father received a 3-acre plot as part of President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s land reforms of the 1950s. At the time, he said, farming met the needs of the whole family. But recent water woes are leaving him no choice but to join the growing rural exodus in hopes of finding a doorman job in the city.

“I have no other option but to move to Cairo,” Abdul Rahman said, “until the state finds a solution to the water crisis and life returns to our lands.”

 
Reference: https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/05/dry-nile-river-egypt.html#ixzz5omX7MZu1