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Dr. Nilgün Birgören Premium Member Group moderatorThe company name is only visible to registered members.Deserted Development
*Farming in sand was never going to be easy. But the country may need to reassess the water, and money, being funneled into desert agriculture.*
Farming was born in the fertile floodplains of Egypt, and for much of the nine millennia since, it has been a driving force behind the country’s social and economic development. Today is no different; agriculture employs 34% of the workforce and accounts for 17% of GDP and 30% of commodity exports.
But with Egypt’s population expected to reach 120 million by 2050, urban encroachment and an increasingly limited supply of clean water mean the area of cultivatable land per capita is dwindling.
Agricultural expansion through desert reclamation and increased productivity of existing farmland has long been considered a crucial part of the country’s development.
As water security climbs to the top of the political agenda, both here and abroad, water management in an industry that uses 85% of the nation’s resources has never been so important.
Recognition of the problem is there, as is the technology to facilitate solutions, but although policy and practices are improving, more needs to be done to get the most out of Nile resources, experts say.
Stealing Back the Sands
In a country where 95% of a burgeoning population occupies just 5% of the land — the vast majority clinging to the Nile — the desire to redistribute some of the water and expand arable land from such a thin vertical green stripe is natural.
“In the desert, land is not a constraining factor in the sense that there’s plenty of it,” says Dr. Rick Tutwiler, Director of the Desert Development Center (DDC) at the American University in Cairo. “Whereas in the valley, it’s land [that is the limiting factor] and water is not the problem.”
The DDC was opened by the AUC in 1979 in the hope that the university could contribute to sustainable development in desert lands. The center was founded on the premise that Egypt’s desert areas were a potential solution to the problems of rural unemployment, urban overcrowding and food security.
The government has pursued a policy of horizontal expansion rather than vertical intensification — making the stripe thicker, not greener — since the 1980s, with reclamation projects and incentives such as cheap land for college graduates who relocate outside of cities. Water is recognized as a key resource in achieving this aim.
While water can be found in some areas of the desert — blooming oases supplied by the vast Nubian Sandstone Aquifer dot the Western Valley — it is widely accepted that such underground reserves are not being replenished and could be exhausted in 50 years. The large amounts of water required for desert reclamation generally need a more sustainable source.
Controlling the flow of the Nile for agricultural purposes is not a new concept: In the twenty-fourth century BC, Pharaoh Amenemhat III expanded 250km of a natural waterway to create the Bahr Yussef canal, flooding a natural depression 80km southwest of Cairo to create new farmland and living space in what is now Fayoum. More recently, the Aswan High Dam, late President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s engineering legacy, has regulated the flow of the Nile and given farmers greater control over irrigation and improved productivity since it’s completion in 1971.
Egyptian rulers have never shied away from grandiose construction projects, and the most recent attempt to reclaim the desert is no exception.
In 1997, President Hosni Mubarak announced a series of mega-projects to divert Nile water to the Western Desert and the Sinai Peninsula, with the aim of turning feddan upon feddan of barren landscapes into lush, cultivatable dwelling grounds.
The projects were to cost more than LE 300 billion and reclaim 3.4 million feddans (14,280 square kilometers) of desert by 2017. Moreover, they would provide prime agricultural land from which urban desert-cities could grow, easing the burden on the overcrowded Nile Valley.
Mubarak’s Pyramid
The most ambitious and controversial of the projects is Toshka, located 225km south of Aswan. At a cost of LE 5.5 billion, the unparalleled undertaking would see 5.5 billion cubic meters of water each year — equivalent to 10% of Egypt’s share of the Nile — diverted to an intricate desert irrigation system. The hope was to attract large-scale commercial farmers to the region, who in turn would bring investment, development, and, ultimately, resettlement.
But its results have been mixed. Dr. Mamdouh Hamza, owner and founder of Hamza Associates, a civil engineering firm behind the project, called it a failure. Designed to cultivate up 540,000 feddans, he said it has not even come close to reaching that figure.
“Toshka [] did nothing. Up to now, they cultivated maybe only 12,000. Why? Bad management.”
Concerns were raised before the project had broken ground. Some said the money could be better spent elsewhere. Others insisted the government’s vision of phased development — agriculture would be followed by infrastructure, housing, industry, commerce, and even tourism — was unrealistic, pointing to the historical reluctance of people to relocate to sweltering desert areas.
The centerpiece of the Toshka project is the president’s very own engineering marvel, the Mubarak Pumping Station, capable of lifting 25 million cubic meters of water per day from the west bank of Lake Nasser. From here, the water runs 50km westward along the giant Sheikh Zayed Canal, a further 22km along one of four north-south distribution canals and is finally delivered via 800m of irrigation pipelines.
The accomplishments are impressive. The Mubarak Pumping Station was one of five finalists in the 2005 Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Award presented by the American Society of Civil Engineers, but it appears nobody wants to live in this engineer’s playground.
Government ministers have tightened their lips about the project. Last year, however, former Minister of Construction and Housing Hasaballah Al-Kafrawi, who was responsible for much of the desert resettlement in the 80s and early 90s, reportedly told satellite TV show Al-Taba’a Al-Ola (First Edition) that Toshka was “useless” and a “waste of billions” of pounds.
While Toshka’s legacy hangs in the balance, some of the other mega-projects are beginning to bear fruit.
East Owainat, located in the far southwest of the country, some 350km south of Dakhla Oasis, is another project on which the government has spent large amounts of money (LE 3.5 billion) installing the necessary irrigation to turn a swath of desert (255,000 feddans) into farmland for commercial farmers to grow crops destined for export. The difference is that East Owainat relies solely on groundwater from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer.
Along with the string of oases in the Western Desert — among them Dakhla, Kharga and Farafra — that also rely on the huge aquifer for their water supply, East Owainat’s dependence on a non-renewable source means that farmers need to make every drop count. For this reason, despite being controversial, the new commercial farms are technological leaders when it comes to desert crop production.
Crop-Per-Drop
For centuries, farmers in the Nile Valley have irrigated their rice paddies and wheat fields by opening floodgates above sloping plots, allowing water to gush along mud-carved channels, inundating rows of crops before draining back into the river.
The picture of a modern desert farm is very different: Black rubber hoses snake their way through dusty earth to deliver drops of water and fertilizer directly to the roots of regimented crops.
This “drip irrigation” gives farmers absolute control over how much water is supplied to crops: color-coded emitters dotted along the hoses supply 0.5, 1, or 2 gallons of water per hour; pumps can be turned on for a few hours at a time or left to drip continually; and the flow rate and fertilizer content can be altered to accommodate variations in soil, weather and seasons.
In a region where daytime temperatures can top 60°C, drip irrigation is especially beneficial as it eliminates the need for long, open canals and drains, a major source or water loss due to evaporation and seepage.
Unfortunately, these high-tech, water-sipping farms could not provide a starker contrast to small-scale farmers tapping the aquifer in the Western Valley.
“Settlers would often come from the Nile Valley, move to a desert farm and try to do exactly what they did in the Nile Valley,” says Dr. Tina Jaskolski, a researcher at the DDC. “You have flood irrigation in the valley, which is OK-ish because the water goes back to the Nile. But in the desert it just doesn’t work.”
Jaskolski has spent the last three years with the DDC, finding ways to help settlers farm sustainably in the desert. She explains that despite the education and solutions offered through DDC community outreach programs, much of the water brought up from the aquifer by continuously flowing wells is difficult to manage. Ultimately, it ends up collecting in drains and lakes, leaving salt in the soil before eventually evaporating.
“It’s really hard to watch all this water loss in the oases out there. You could improve things quite easily [with] straightforward interventions. The real problem is financing and actual implementation,” she says. “They’re farming on water that we know is going to run out, but a lot of those farmers don’t know that.”
The awareness gap isn’t limited to irrigation. Misguided decisions over which crops to cultivate mean farmers aren’t making the most of the limited water supply.
“When water does reach the farmers’ fields, it is often not put to the highest-value use,” reads a 2007 report from the World Bank on the MENA region. “Across MENA, farmers use water from publicly funded irrigation networks to grow low-value crops, often with low yields, rather than specializing in the higher value crops, such as fruits, vegetables, and nuts, in which they have a comparative advantage.”
The same soaring temperatures that have inhibited migration to reclaimed areas in the southern desert give farmers a comparative advantage over their peers in cooler climes. Tomatoes, grapes, melons, oranges and a plethora of other horticultural sun-seekers can be grown year round and sold at a premium during the winter to foreign markets. European customers pay higher prices still for produce grown naturally and according to organic standards; standards that are far easier to meet on new farmland such as Toshka and East Owainat that have no history of agricultural chemical use.
Commercial farms with economies of scale, advanced packaging and refrigeration facilities and access to high-speed international transportation are already capitalizing on this advantage. In the absence of such luxuries, however, oasis farmers are far more reluctant to turn their backs on staple crops such as wheat, rice and sugarcane for which they have a guaranteed buyer: the government. As long as farmers have an unmetered water supply and subsidized fertilizer for staple crops, they are unlikely to change their ways.
What Goes Around, Comes Around
Inefficient and irresponsible water use will likely continue for the foreseeable future. There is, however, another solution being implemented to “create” water.
“The essential assumption is that there will be increased recycling in the future,” says DDC’s Tutwiler. “That’s because of the continued growth of population and not a growth in water supply. How do you reconcile the two and maintain the amount of water available per capita? The only answer is: Use it more than once.”
Water recycling is not a new concept. “Planning for re-use projects in the late seventies and early eighties was marked by the desire to [] use as much drainage water as possible, especially for the irrigation of large land reclamation projects in the eastern and western parts of the Delta,” read a 2003 report from the Water Management Research Institute (WMRI) at the government’s National Water Research Center.
Since then, the scope of the projects has become more ambitious. Al-Salam Canal — part of the North Sinai Development Project, the final facet of Mubarak’s 1997 reclamation program — uses an equal mix of drainage water and fresh Nile water to irrigate reclaimed farmland.
Expected to cost LE 7.5 billion by the time all construction is complete, the 262-km canal has already begun taking water from the Delta and channeling it underneath the Suez Canal to the Sinai desert; cultivation is under way and the total irrigated area is anticipated to reach 400,000 feddans.
But the WRMI warns that using recycled water is not without its challenges. “The major problem regarding drainage water quality is not salinity, but chemical and bacteriological pollution. Where main surface drains pass through major urban and industrial areas, they invariably turn into major carriers of untreated wastewater.”
Besides the direct health concern posed by waterborne bacteria, viruses, and parasites, untreated wastewater can be disastrous for farmers; many chemical pollutants are toxic to crops, altered acidity levels can affect mineral absorption, and suspended solids can cause clogging of irrigation systems.
“The biggest danger we are facing is pollution,” says Nahla Abou El Fotouh, Director of the WMRI. “The Ministry of Housing keeps pushing these projects to get water to new areas, but the problem is that projects that should have gone hand-in-hand to purify the resulting sewage water are not getting as much attention.”
The government is taking action to address such concerns. Earlier this year, Egyptian construction giant Orascom won two separate contracts worth LE 2.58 billion — as part of a joint venture — and LE 225 million to build water treatment plants in Cairo. The two projects will be closely watched as they could, if successful, pave the way for similar lucrative deals in the rest of the country.
“We’re approaching a serious situation and the technology is growing for processing this stuff,” says Tutwiler. “I think we’re on the verge of some big changes.”
Big changes may well be afoot, but without the necessary water management and education, the billions being poured into the desert may create nothing more than sandcastles in the sky.
Source: Financial Times
- 17 Dec 2009, 5:10 pm
