Egypt working to reclaim the desert

SFGate

Not Egyptology, but it's a slow news day and the topic might be of interest to some visitors:

Abu Minqar, 404 miles southwest of Cairo, had previously been a bleak moonscape before the government began drilling for water in 1987 in the vast Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. Now, this area is a green stretch of wheat fields and lemon trees.

"Here, we are free," said longtime resident Magdy Mubaraz Ibrahim. "We can plant whatever we want and do whatever we want."

Reclaiming Egypt's desert lands, which cover about 96 percent of the nation's territory, has been a major government objective for more than 50 years. Successive presidents have said reclamation is a key component in countering not only urban crowding - the population grows by 1.5 million annually - but high unemployment. The official unemployment rate is 10 percent, but many believe it is twice that amount. Currently, 98 percent of Egypt's 78 million inhabitants live in the densely populated Nile River Valley or along the Mediterranean Sea.

But in the past five decades, development experts estimate that as many as 2 million people have moved to reclaimed lands in the Sinai and Sahara deserts. Such desert plots now account for almost 25 percent of Egypt's 8 million acres under cultivation, these same experts say.

If anyone is interested in modern Egypt and its various social and economic projects I can recommend the book Egypt, An Economic Geography by Fouad N. Ibrahim and Barbara Ibrahim (I.B. Taurus 2003).