Mubarak’s Pyramids

Egypt reacted furiously, even threatening war, when five upstream Nile countries signed an agreement in May denying Egypt its veto power over any project anywhere along the world’s longest river, a privilege it won in a 1959 treaty. Cairo’s concern about developments upstream is understandable, as the Nile provides 97 percent of the country’s water. But it may also be a touch hypocritical for Egypt to deny others the right to use the river for irrigation and power generation, when it has done exactly that for decades. Since the 1960s in particular, Egypt has invested billions of dollars in harnessing the Nile’s power. The country’s most famous water engineering work is, of course, the Aswan High Dam, the world’s biggest when it was inaugurated in 1971. The dam has prevented the river from flooding, allowing farmers to grow multiple crops per year, and created the immense reservoir of Lake Nasser.