Environment: Western Desert groundwater could last 300 years

Egypt Daily Star News

As the Arab Water Council meets today for the first Arab Region Consultative Workshop March 13-15 to prepare its research papers and regional reports for the Fifth World Water Forum in Istanbul in March 2009, many questions surround Egypt’s water situation.

UN and World Bank reports warn of the grave threats to Egypt’s freshwater supplies posed by climate change, while a series of water shortages in rural areas last summer highlighted the need for improvements in Egypt’s water supply network.

The Ministry and the government have also come in for heavy domestic criticism over the Toshka land reclamation project, which has fallen far short of its targets, and criticism from abroad for its refusal to relinquish the 1959 Nile Treaty, which effectively gives Egypt 85 percent and Sudan 15 percent of the entire water of the river Nile.

“So far the [10] Nile Basin countries only use five percent of the total available Nile water,” explained the Minister for Water and Irrigation, Mahmoud Abu Zeid, in an interview with Daily News Egypt at the Ministry’s Nile Water Authority in Nasr City.

“Therefore the Nile Treaty only pertains to that five percent of the water, so the goal is for other countries to use more Nile water that is going to waste.”

Egypt, along with the other nine Nile Basin countries are part of what is known as the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), which aims to put together a final status agreement over the distribution of the Nile’s water, and promote joint cooperation with other Basin countries.

While the minister admitted that the Toshka part of Egypt’s land reclamation project has taken longer and cost more than expected, he insisted that the results would be worth the wait and said that many investors, predominantly from the Arab world, had begun investing in the reclaimed land.

The ministry is also engaged in developing groundwater resources in the Western Desert — known as the Nubian Sandstone aquifer — the minister said, adding that if it was exploited carefully it could last as long as 300 years.

See the above page for the full story.