| Sports |
By WILL RASMUSSEN
Egypt plans to green Sahara desert
CAIRO: It looks like a mirage
but the lush fields of cauliflower, apricot trees and melon
growing among a vast stretch of sand north of Cairo’s pyramids
is all too real – proof of Egypt’s determination to turn its
deserts green.
While climate change and land over-use help many deserts across
the world advance, Egypt is slowly greening the sand that covers
almost all of its territory as it seeks to create more space for
its growing population.
Tarek el-Kowmey, 45, points proudly to the banana trees he grows
on what was once Sahara sands near the Desert Development
Centre, north of Cairo, where scientists experiment with
high-tech techniques to make Egypt’s desert bloom.
“All of this used to be just sand,” he said. “Now we can grow
anything.”
With only 5% of the country habitable, almost all of Egypt’s 74
million people live along the Nile River and the Mediterranean
Sea. Already crowded living conditions – Cairo is one of the
most densely populated cities on earth – will likely get worse
as Egypt’s population is expected to double by 2050.
So the government is keen to encourage people to move to the
desert by pressing ahead with an estimated US$70 billion plan to
reclaim 3.4 million acres of desert over the next 10 years.
Among the incentives are cheap desert land to college graduates.
But to make these areas habitable and capable of cultivation,
the government will need to tap into scarce water resources of
the Nile River as rainfall is almost non-existent in Egypt.
The plan has raised controversy among some conservationists who
say turning the desert green is neither practical nor
sustainable and might ultimately backfire.
Anders Jagerskog, director of the Stockholm International Water
Institute in Sweden, questions the wisdom of using precious
water resources to grow in desert areas unsuited to cultivation
and where water will evaporate quickly under the scorching sun.
“A desert is not the best place to grow food. From a political
perspective, it makes sense in terms of giving more people jobs
even though it is not very rational from a water perspective,”
he added.
The scope of the reclamation could also add to regional tension
over Nile water sharing arrangements as in order to green its
desert Egypt might need to take more than its share of Nile
water determined by international treaties.
Egypt’s project to reclaim deserts in the south, called “Toshka”,
would expand Egypt’s farmland by about 40% by 2017, using about
five billion cubic metres of water a year.
That worries neighbours to the south who are already unhappy
about Nile water sharing arrangements. Under a 1959 treaty
between Egypt and Sudan, Egypt won rights to 55.5 billion cubic
metres per year, more than half of the Nile’s total flow.
Ethiopia, where the Blue Nile begins, receives no formal
allocation of Nile water, but it is heavily dependent on the
water for its own agricultural development in this often famine
ravaged country.
“The Toshka project will complicate the challenge of achieving a
more equitable allocation of the Nile River with Ethiopia and
the other Nile basin countries,” Sandra Postel, director of the
US-based Global Water Policy Project, said. “Egypt may be
setting the stage for a scenario that’s ultimately detrimental
to itself.”
But other experts suggest that in the delicate arena of water
politics, it may be more of an imperative for Egypt’s government
to mollify its own population rather than heed its neighbours
concerns.
Overcrowding is straining infrastructure in the cities and the
government is worried that opposition groups such as the
Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which has a fifth of the seats in
Parliament, might capitalise on discontent.
“The government feels it needs to reduce the number of people in
high density areas, which puts a lot of pressure on resources
like fertile land,” Mostafa Saleh, professor of ecology at Al
Azhar University in Cairo, said. “They are trying to spread the
population to other parts of the country.”
Some critics say Egypt should look at desert tourism rather than
agriculture, which might not be sustainable or particularly
profitable and could destroy fragile wildlife habitats that
might otherwise be a drawcard for tourists. – Reuters
 
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