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.
In 1997, Egypt’s current President Hosni Mubarak launched another colossal project, and one that could not have existed without the Aswan High Dam: the South Valley Development Project, better known as the Toshka Project. Named after a natural depression some 225 kilometers south of Aswan, this massive development scheme foresees pumping Nile water from Lake Nasser into a 210-kilometer network of newly constructed canals to develop and cultivate 540,000 feddan (or 2,268 square kilometers) of desert land.
In the distant future, Egypt’s amount of cultivable land could be doubled if the government’s dream of creating a “second Nile Valley” becomes a reality. To do this, they would need to connect Lake Nasser and Toshka with Egypt’s string of western oases. Considering such grand ambitions, it comes as no surprise that the Egyptian press has hailed the project as “Mubarak’s Pyramids.”
Some critics even claim it should never have been started. For example, former Minister of Construction and Housing Hasaballah al-Kafrawi, defined the project as “useless and a waste of billions,” with the ‘billions’ referring to both gallons of water and dollars.
Bringing the desert to life
Situated in the south western corner of Lake Nasser, the Toshka Project’s engine is the $500 million Mubarak Pumping Station, which is said to be the world’s largest. Its 24 turbines can pump up to 25 million cubic meters of water per day into the 50-kilometer long Sheikh Zayed Canal. Both were completed around 2003. Named after the late ruler of the United Arab Emirates, the canal splits into two main networks; the northern part was completed some five years ago and the southern branch is slated to be inaugurated this August.
As former deputy chairman of Egypt’s National Water Resources Center, Dia el-Din el-Quosy supervised the birth of the Toshka Project.
“There is a big controversy about Toshka,” he said, sipping a tea in Cairo’s Groppi Café. “People complain that too much money has been spent. But the government had invested some 7 billion Egyptian pounds ($1.27 billion) when I left in 2003, and has not spent much more since.”
“People tend to forget that Toshka was no overnight decision. The project was first formulated in the 1960s and only presented to the public in the late 1990s,” he added.
According to Quosy, the project should be seen as part of the country’s “horizontal development” strategy. Egypt is running out of space. Some 95 percent of its population of around 80 million lives in the Nile delta, which represents but five percent of Egypt’s territory. As the Salam Canal did previously, the Toshka Project aims to lure people away from the densely populated Nile delta and the river banks.
“The aim of Toshka is to create jobs by developing a core of economic activities, including mining, industry, tourism, as well as agriculture,” said Quosy. “In the future the region could be home to some 3 million Egyptians.”
In laying the foundations for Toshka, the Egyptian government adopted a textbook liberal approach. The state played a facilitating role by developing the necessary infrastructure and offering an attractive investment climate to draw in the private sector, which in turn will build firms, farms and factories. The plan started well enough; for a bargain price of some $2,100 per square kilometer, most land was sold in no time.
According to the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, some 1,430 square kilometers were allocated to a handful of major companies, including Prince Walid bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding, the Emirati firm Al Zahra, the Egyptian South Valley Development Company and Al Raghy Holding. Around 840 square kilometers along the project’s southern branches remain open to investors. So far, however, according to the ministry, only 147 square kilometers have been cultivated and nothing else has been developed — some claim even less land has been made available for agriculture. No doubt the recent credit crunch has made investors reluctant or unable to invest large amounts of money. Rumor has it, however, that some investors find it more lucrative to sell the land than to develop it.
“I agree that the project’s implementation may not have been perfect,” said Quosy. “First of all, there is too much emphasis on agriculture. Secondly, it seems that investors such as Prince bin Talal — whom I respect a lot — are more interested in the hotel business than in agriculture. Agriculture is a long term investment. If investors fail to develop the land, then I think the government will be forced to take it back and distribute it among other investors.”
Yet Quosy remains an advocate of the Toshka scheme. “We have the water, we have the land, all we have to do is work,” he said.
Not everyone agrees. According Mohamed Salama, professor of irrigation and hydraulics at the Cairo University, there are more fundamental problems involved.
“From an engineering project of view, it’s an excellent project: it is well made,” Salama said. “The problem is that the temperature at Toshka reaches up to 50 degrees. As the water is pumped into open canals, we have lost an enormous amount of water over the past five years due to evaporation. I estimate some 1,000 cubic meters a day. In addition, because of the high evaporation rate, crops need relatively more water. While farmers in the north need, on average, some 20 to 25 cubic meters per feddan per day, in the south they need up to twice as much.”
The test of time
The Egyptian government could have opted for constructing tunnels instead of canals to reduce the project’s average evaporation rate, but that would have made the project up to seven times more expensive.
“There is a social problem as well,” Salama continued. “To develop the region, you need people, and the idea is to move people from the over-populated north to the south.”
Given the heat and inhospitable climate, he said few would opt to make this choice, especially given the lack of facilities, such as hospitals and schools. “If the project is to be continued, I think it better to have people from southern Egypt work in Toshka, as they are used to the climate,” said Salama. Contrary to Quosy, Salama thinks it is best to stop the Toshka project sooner rather than later, instead of pouring in more water and money. “But what to do with the billions invested so far?” he asked.
Richard Tutwiler, head of the Desert Development Center at the American University of Cairo, just returned from a visit to Toshka and confirmed that so far little land has been developed. Although he agreed that some major question marks remain, he was hesitant to call for the project to be stopped right away.
“One major question is: will there be enough water?” said Tutwiler. “A river is a perfect irrigation and drainage system. You take out water, use it, and let it flow back into the river. The water is then reused further downstream. When you take out water to develop the desert you loose that advantage of a natural drainage system.”
He added that “desert developments” take at least 20 years, so the success of Toshka needs another decade to be determined.
There are also problems on the political front; Toshka has now become a highly sensitive (and as a result, taboo) subject. While Egypt’s newspapers continue to criticize upstream countries for wanting to develop Nile related projects, “Mubarak’s Pyramids” have largely vanished from the media’s radar. As a consequence, there is no public debate about the billions of gallons and dollars that have been spent so far and will be spent in the future.
That should perhaps come as no surprise, as we are talking about Mubarak’s legacy here. Just as his predecessors Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar el-Sadat did with the Aswan High Dam and Salam Canal, respectively, Mubarak attached his name and his reputation to a major water work that — on paper — has the potential to significantly alter the face of Egypt. The 81-year-old president does not want to be associated with the world’s biggest state-of-the-art pumping station and canal network if, at some point in the future, it becomes a white elephant abandoned and left to the desert.
