Egypt is building an artificial river parallel to the Nile River at a cost of $5.2 billion and as part of its New Delta project.
Authorities say the river will help expand agricultural land and reduce the need to import food and wheat.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February last year drove a global surge in wheat prices, leaving Egypt struggling as it is the world's biggest wheat importer.
Russia and Ukraine supplied Egypt with 80 per cent of its wheat imports in 2021.
Authorities have said that water for the artificial river will come from recycled agricultural drainage and groundwater.
Egypt is facing a water scarcity crisis and UNICEF has said that the country will run out of water by 2025.
In October last year, farmers in Egypt raised the alarm that social tensions would rise over the lack of water because of water shortages and climate change.
Yesterday, news circulated that Egypt's annual inflation rate hit a record high in June at 36.8 per cent, as the country continues to grapple with a severe economic crisis.
Egyptians have been grappling with price rises for months and many citizens are struggling to buy basic food products like fruit and meat due to rising inflation.
Activists have criticised the Egyptian government for pouring money into what have become known as vanity projects across the country as the economy continues to spiral.
One of the biggest of these projects is the multi-million-dollar New Administrative Capital being built 50 kilometres from Cairo on a patch of desert.
Even though the government presented the capital as a development that would make Cairo greener, rights groups have said that the waste produced, and the energy and water used, could have been better spent on creating infrastructure to tackle climate change.
This is really interesting, reminds me of that similar project in Libya. Not sure if it'll actually work or not but achieving food self-sufficiency is a really big thing - though far from the only thing - that countries will need to achieve in order to form any kind of resistance to foreign oppression.
Here's an article from the Egypt Independent I found that goes into more detail:
Egypt is digging through the desert to create the largest artificial river in the northwest of the country, next to the Dabaa nuclear power plant, as part of its ‘New Delta’ project.
Professor of Water Resources and Irrigation, Abbas Sharaky, told RT that the agricultural activity in Egypt in recent years now extends to implement several major national projects, including a project to cultivate 1.5 million acres on non-renewable groundwater at 80 percent – most of which is in the Western Desert.
He added that the second project is the New Delta, west of Alexandria, to cultivate 2.2 million acres, depending on surface water from the Rashid branch of the Nile River, and agricultural drainage water after being treated through the artificial river, which will transfer water from al-Hammam plant, which is the largest treatment plant in the world, and part of the groundwater.
Sharaky continued: “The artificial river project is one of the most important water projects in recent years in terms of construction engineering and economic importance. It is a giant engineering work consisting of three channels that are constructed in different conditions from the rest of the irrigation channels in Egypt, as it transports water to desert areas that are more than 100 meters above the Nile River level.”
“The first channel is 42 km long, including 26 km of pipes, and 16 km of open channels to transport about 10 million cubic meters from the Rashid branch within the Mostakbal Egypt project,” he explained, adding that this, “represents the first phase of the grand project in the New Delta, with a total of about 3.5 billion cubic meters annually to irrigate about 600,000 acres, in addition to groundwater wells to irrigate 450,000 acres, with a total of 1.05 million acres, in which there are six large water pumping stations.”
“The second channel extends about 170 km from Hammam station to transfer seven million cubic meters/ day, with a total of about 2.5 billion cubic meters, to the south of Dabaa, to irrigate about 800,000 acres, of which 22 km are pipes with a length of 220 km and a diameter of thee meters, and 148 km of open canal, with 13 water pumping stations.”
“The third channel within the Jannat Masr (Egypt Paradise) project, which is two pipe lines with a length of 12 km, to irrigate about 64,000 acres, from the southern and western wastewater treatment plants in the 6th of October City, and the desalination of salty groundwater through 132 underground wells, and three water pumping stations,” he added.
He pointed out that the cost of the New Delta project amounts to LE 160 billion, and it contributes to bridging the food gap in cooperation with other agricultural projects.
Sharaky said that the biggest challenge now is to provide the necessary water as the Nile may not bear pumping the required amount of water given the fixed annual share is limited to 55.5 billion cubic meters, and the groundwater has high salinity.
In order to maximize the benefit from the artificial river, “we must focus on growing crops that thrive in the Egyptian desert lands with a high return for internal use or for export to pay part of the project cost,” he added.
Sounds like a bad cyberpunk story. Meet me in new Cairo by the banks of the second Nile.
What else could they do though? Rights groups in the article say it's better to spend money working on climate change lmao. As if Egypt doing that would save them against all the pollution from the developed world
They (and everybody) need to achieve food self sufficiency or they'll be shackled to imperialist powers forever
Didn't Egypt provide the majority of wheat production for the roman empire? Why are they now the largest importer? I assume it's climate change related, but that's quite a reversal.
Yeah Climate Change and Desertification are the reasons I've always seen
Towards the end of the third century CE, multiple formerly thriving farming villages at the edges of the district went into decline and were eventually abandoned. This paper presents a new perspective on causes of this abandonment by synthesizing existing research. The papyri as well as the archaeological record imply that irrigation problems arising simultaneously from the third century CE lay at the heart of the problem and led to the progressive desertification of formerly agricultural land. The surviving documentation allows us to trace what increasing water stress meant on the ground for the local population and what adaption strategies they undertook to deal with the degradation and desertification of their farmlands. While socio-economic factors certainly played a role in the decline of these settlements, a change in environmental conditions should be considered as well. In fact, natural proxies record a general shift in East African Monsoon patterns at the source areas of the Nile and consecutively lower Nile flood levels from the beginning of the third century on.
https://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article-abstract/4/4/486/115851/Climate-Change-in-the-Breadbasket-of-the-Roman?redirectedFrom=fulltext https://www.jstor.org/stable/4238709
