The lifeblood of Egypt is running dry (1)

 The clock strikes five on a hot and dry fall morning when 60-something Ali al-Faqi makes his way through the darkness to meet up with four other farmers at the mosque of his Nile Delta village.

By the dim glow of the flickering streetlights, the anxious group sets off on the mile-long trek to their fields just north of Cairo. Holding their breath, they peer into the 8-foot-deep irrigation canals to see if they've finally filled with the promised Nile River water.Thousands of years ago, the Egyptians worshipped the Nile River Goddess Anuket as the “nourisher of the fields” whose summer floods turned the desert green. Today, their descendants are more likely to seek solace from Allah and irrigation agency bureaucrats. But still their lives remain inexorably tied to the health of the world’s longest river.

And recently, the Nile has been hanging them out to dry. The month of October is supposed to mark the tail end of the flood season, when heavy rainfall in the mountains of Ethiopia flows more than 2,000 miles downstream to bring the Egyptian desert to life. But at the time of Al-Monitor's visit to the delta, the canals, or mesquas, used to irrigate Faqi’s 3-acre plot have already been empty for weeks, devastating the seven-member family’s livelihood. Water-intensive rice plants have been replaced with sturdier staples, but to no avail; everywhere Faqi looks, tomato and corn crops are shriveling up, while unripe bananas fall off the trees to rot on the ground.

For more than 15 days, I have been visiting the land to get my share of water,” Faqi laments. “But I cannot find it.”

Farmers aren’t the only ones affected by the dropping water levels. Such scenes of desolation play out up and down the river. In Cairo, urbanites struggle with weak water pressure and garbage-clogged canals. Along the river’s banks, abandoned boats attest to a dying fishing industry. In the tourism heartland around Luxor and Aswan, cruise ships remain docked, unable to navigate the river’s shallow waters. At the Nile’s source in distant Ethiopia, diplomats haggle over international water quotas, as the river’s life-sustaining waters give way to grief and strife.

“The water situation in Egypt is critical,” said Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation Mohamed Abdel Ati. “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.”

Reference: https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/05/dry-nile-river-egypt.html#ixzz5omVAHRyJ