Saturday, May 24, 2014

Egypt's per capita water share falls 60 pct in 66 years- Ahram Online


Egypt's per capita water resources have dropped significantly in the last seven decades and could reach levels of absolute water scarcity by 2025, government statistics agency reports
Ahram Online, Wednesday 21 May 2014
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Water

A young girl looking at flowing tap water in Egypt. (Photo by Reuters)
Egypt's annual water quota per capita has drastically declined by 60 percent in the last 66 years to reach 663 cubic metres, reported state-owned statistics agency CAPMAS Wednesday.

In its latest report, titled “Water Resources and Means to Rationalise their Use,” CAPMAS revealed that each Egyptian's annual share of water declined from a water surplus of 2,526 cubic metres in 1947 to a sufficient level of 1,972 cubic metres in 1970, and then water poverty with 663 cubic metres in 2013.
Egypt's population was 19 million in 1947, swelling to 35.5 million in 1970 and reaching 85 million in 2013.
The United Nations asserts that a population where per capita annual water resources are below 1,000 cubic metres faces water scarcity.
By 2025, an Egyptian’s share in annual water will drop to 582 cubic metres as forecasted by CAPMAS. A level that approaches absolute water scarcity at 500 cubic metres according to the UN figures.
In 2012, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) warned Egypt could face large-scale drought by the end of the century if it fails to make efficient use of its water.
In addition, temperature fluctuations could prompt a 20 percent drop in rainfall.
Since 2002, water resources available for Egyptians increased by almost 24 percent annuallyto reach 74.5 billion cubic metres.
The share in the Nile River water resources remains the main source of potable water for Egyptians at two thirds of the country’s water resources or 55.5 billion cubic metres annually.
Recycling agriculture drainage water and groundwater are the other two main sources of water for Egyptians, which amount to 9.2 billion cubic metres and 7.5 billion cubic metres respectively.
Other sources include recycling wastewater (1.3 billion cubic metres) and salt water desalination (60 million cubic metres).
But efficient use of the country’s resources is not the only challenge facing Egyptians.
In 2011, Ethiopia started construction of a dam set to be the biggest hydroelectric dam in Africa, producing as much as 6,000 megawatts of energy.
Egypt has repeatedly expressed concern that the dam will affect its share of Nile water. Ethiopia insists this will not happen.
Agriculture, meanwhile, is the biggest user of water, consuming more than 80 percent of water resources available to Egypt.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Egypt suffers from water poverty: CAPMAS - Daily News Egypt

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Average of 663 cubic metres of water allocated per person; amount expected to drop below 582 cubic metres by 2025
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Egyptian girls fill water containers from a cistern delivering clean water at al-Rahawe village. Egypt share of water is expected to fall below 582 cubic metres by 2025. (AFP File Photo)

Egyptian girls fill water containers from a cistern delivering clean water at al-Rahawe village.

Egypt share of water is expected to fall below 582 cubic metres by 2025.

(AFP File Photo)
By Mohammed Ayyad
Egypt has reached a stage of water poverty, with an average of 663 cubic metres per citizen, and is expected to fall below 582 cubic metres by 2025, a decline of 60.3%, said a recent study by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) released Tuesday.
The study, titled “Water resources and rationing its use in Egypt”, stated that per capita use of water resources decreased from 2,526 cubic metres in 1947 to 1,672 cubic metres in 1970, a decline of 33.8%. This comes at a time when the adoption of the Ethiopia Dam Renaissance project on the Nile threatens Egypt’s water security.
According to the agency, Egypt’s share of water from the Nile remains stable at 55.5bn cubic metres per year, in accordance with international conventions signed on this issue. The usage of available water resources has increased from 66.6bn cubic metres to 74.5bn cubic metres, an increase of 23.7% over the period from 2002/2003 to 2011/2012.
Agricultural water use represents 82.6% of the total usage of available water resources, and reached 74.5bn cubic metres in 2011/2012. This number is expected to reach 78.9bn cubic metres in 2017. Total use of rainfall by Egypt and Sudan does not exceed 5%, whereas agricultural use of water from rainfall is widely practiced in upstream countries.
The study indicates that 106bn cubic metres of water can be saved from Upper Nile projects through joint cooperation and exchange with Nile Basin countries. An additional 8.5bn cubic metres can be stored in northern lakes and in Egypt’s Wadi Natrun Depression.
The period from 2002/2003 – 2011/2012 witnessed a rise in recycled water from agricultural runoff, from 4.4bn cubic metres to 9.2bn cubic metres, or an increase of 109.1%. This number is expected to reach 10.6bn by 2017. This is in addition to the rise in recycled runoff water from 0.9bn cubic metres to 1.3bn cubic metres during the same period, a rise of 44.4%, and this number is expected to increase to 1.6bn by 2017.
But the amount of groundwater produced in the Nile Valley and Delta remained stable at around 6.1bn cubic metres per year until the year 2006/2007, and increased to 7.5bn cubic metres in 2011/2012. Desalination of seawater remained fixed at 0.06bn cubic metres during the period of the study with the exception of 2009/2010 and 2010/2011, in which it fell to 0.05bn cubic metres per year.
According to CAPMAS, the total area of agricultural expansion projects on the horizon for 2017 is 3.5m acres (31.4% in South Valley, 20.5% in Sinai, 17.5% in the western delta, 17.5% in Upper Egypt, 13.1% in the eastern delta).
Average losses of water from irrigation systems running between fields in Aswan was 15.7bn cubic metres over the period from 2003-2012, with losses coming as a result of both evaporation and leakages, which require costly investments to reduce. Average loss of agricultural land has reached 25,000 acres, and this has increased since the January 2011 revolution due to construction on agricultural lands.

Friday, May 16, 2014

The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Book Review:- Official version - Review - Books - Ahram Online

Book Review: The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam - Official version
Former Egyptian irrigation and water resources minister examines the history of Ethiopia's plans to construct a dam on the Nile River
Mahmoud El-Wardani, Thursday 15 May 2014
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Cover
Azmat Sadd Al-Nahda Al-Ethiopi book cover
Azmat Sadd Al-Nahda Al-Ethiopi (The Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Crisis) by Mohamed Nasr El-Din Allam, Dar Al-Mahroussa Publishing, Cairo, 2014. pp.242
The story of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which Ethiopia has already started to construct, has a long history that dates back to the 1950s. Ethiopia has attempted many times to control the sources of the Nile -- Egypt's lifeline.
The book's author is a former Egyptian minister of irrigation and water resources, who took office in 2009 in a decisive period in which Ethiopia attempted to build an alliance of upstream states against downstream states. The objective of this alliance was to breach the historic Nile treaties.
Certainly the author is not just an official running one of the oldest ministries in Egypt and the most bureaucratic, but he also has intimate knowledge of the minutest details of the issue. This issue is directly linked to Egyptian national security. It goes without saying that all documents, treaties, maps, data and agreements were at his disposal.
The reader is faced with a serious work that is technical and supported with accurate numbers. At the same time, he sets out a practical plan to confront future threats or at least minimise them.
Egypt is facing a real water crisis because its Nile River quota has been almost fixed since 1959, while its water needs have multiplied due to its soaring population (26 million person in 1959 to 90 million person today), its agricultural area has expanded from under 6 million feddans to 8.4 feddans, while its industry has also grown and naturally all this has increased its demand for water.
Since the 1970s, water use has surpassed water resources every year. These deficits are managed by the state through recycling. The water situation is extremely perilous because Egypt gets 95 percent of its water needs from the Nile. Egypt gets its fixed annual quota of water according to a 1959 treaty with Sudan.
It is expected that the crisis will worsen in the near future because of the secession of South Sudan and the impact of this on Egypt's water quota, and also because of the current approach of the Sudanese state based on distancing itself from Egypt and aligning with Ethiopia.
During the last two decades, Israel's role became prominent once again, Somalia crumbled, Eritrea became independent, South Sudan became independent and Ethiopia and Uganda became rising regional powers. These two countries specifically played important roles in the region with support from the big Western powers.
In the fourth chapter, the author mentions that Ethiopia, in particular, submitted a legal complaint to the UN protesting the aforementioned 1959 treaty. Emperor Haile Selassie decided to sever the Ethiopian Church from the Egyptian Coptic Church after 1,600 years. In response to constructing the High Dam, the United States government sent a large mission from the American Bureau of Reclamation to Ethiopia to conduct a survey of the Blue Nile lands and construct a number of dams. Some of these were constructed without consulting the downstream states or even notifying them.
Dr Allam asserts that Ethiopia took advantage of the circumstances in Egypt after the January 2011 revolution to begin constructing the dam. International and Egyptian studies show the dam will make large agricultural areas barren, lower the groundwater table and cause negative effects on fish resources, Nile tourism, river transport and a huge decrease in electricity production coming from the High Dam and the Aswan Dam. In addition to this, it will shrink the role of the High Dam in protecting Egypt from famines and the ravages of the years of low flood. It will also result in environmental deterioration, pollution in northern lakes and seawater intrusion in the coastal aquifers. Moreover, Egypt and Sudan will suffer huge dangers if the Renaissance Dam crumbles.
From another perspective, the author sees the Renaissance Dam crisis as a political issue in the first place, which requires a speedy reaction from the Egyptian state in order to achieve a quantum leap in negotiations with the Ethiopian leadership. He suggests, for instance, achieving an immediate agreement on the formation of an international committee to examine the dangers of the Renaissance Dam while requesting a halt in construction activities during the experts' study, which should not exceed six months, and reaching an agreement about a mechanism to resolve the dispute between the two states.
If such measures fail, Egypt will have no other choice but to file a complaint with the African Union or the UN Security Council or both. This step will internationalise the issue with all the unwanted consequences. Therefore it must be studied thoroughly. Anyway, the author suggests attempting to make Ethiopia agree to resort to either the International Court of Justice or the Arab League, African Union or the Security Council in order to remove the damage caused by constructing the dam, which threatens the regional and international peace and security.
Despite the fact that the author has vast and accurate knowledge in the field of the Nile and his personal awareness of Ethiopian policies, with American and Israeli backing, he does not point out the catastrophic errors of Hosni Mubarak's regime in this context following the failed assassination attempt against him in Ethiopia in the 1990s. Egypt turned its back for two whole decades on Africa. It did not practise its historical role of preserving its national security through cooperation, understanding and support for the upstream states as Muhammad Ali Pasha did almost two centuries ago.

Women in Ethiopia struggle to survive without water | MSNBC

  • Thatch-roofed huts that house families of six or more in the mountaintop village of Jarso, Ethiopia.
  • Uchiya Nallo, a 29-year-old mother is eight months pregnant. Here, she descends the side of a mountain where she, her husband and their son live. She makes the journey down to a dry river bed twice a day.
  • After reaching the dry riverbed, women must spend time scratching the dirt until brackish water appears, scoop it into their containers and carry nearly 5 gallons of water up the mountain.
  • Brackish water dug up from a dry riverbed in the southern Konso Region of Ethiopia.
  • Women and young girls are responsible for the collection of water, four times a day, often at distances requiring them to trek across mountains, sometimes during dark periods of the day.
  • A dried-up area of the Sagan River running through Konso, Ethiopia.
  • Mariam Bakaule lives on a hill in Jarso, in southwest Ethiopia. Like other villagers, she gets up at dawn and walks for more than two hours on steep and stony paths to reach the nearest source - a dry river bed. There, she must dig through the sand with bare hands to reach the water and fill her container.
  • A woman who recently gave birth to a daughter clings to life while being carried by men in her village.
  • Yellow jerry cans overflow into the street.  The large containers are the primary vehicle for moving water from river beds to the surrounding villages.
  • A young girl making the common trek from river to home.
  • A villager scene in Teshmale.
  • A newly installed water point in the Ethiopian village of Leyte begins to spurt water for the first time. At first the water emerged brown and murky, but then flowed clean and clear.
  • Two girls hoist their jerry cans to their back for the return trip up to their village of Teshmale in Ethiopia.
  • A group of friends drink a local beer brewed using the unsafe water from riverbeds.
  • A villager in Teshmale refills a serving of locally made beer in front of her home.
  • Twilight sets in the Konso Region along the main road that cuts east-to-west.
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Thatch-roofed huts that house families of six or more in the mountaintop village of Jarso, Ethiopia.
Photo by Mustafah Abdulaziz

By Mustafah Abdulaziz and Johnny Simon

In the Konso Region of southern Ethiopia, the struggle for clean, safe water is a daily reality for women and young girls.
“Bringing the water is not a simple task,” says Mariam Bakaule, a mother standing at the edge of the mountaintop village of Jarso. “This is the essence of women. Water and woman are synonymous here.”
The village of Jarso, like many of the others in the area, overlooks a vast valley stretching towards the Kenyan border. Yet the relative greenery of the region is deceptive. For the 13,000 people in Jarso, lack of rain in recent years has caused crops of maize, sorghum and haricot beans to fail.
At the center of this struggle to survive are the women and young girls whose responsibility it is to trek up to five hours a day to reach dry river beds, only to wait in long lines for scant resources. Uchiya Nallo, an eight-months-pregnant 29-year-old mother, spends half her day climbing a mountainside carrying more than 5 gallons (about 40 pounds) of water.
“The road is very dangerous and I feel tired all the time,” she says. “I am worried because sometimes I fall down and hurt myself. I worry because I feel tired. Now I am almost ready to give birth and I am walking slowly but maybe I will have some problems, I’m not sure.”
The correlation between the risk of maternal mortality for women in the developing world and access to safe water and sanitation is little understood. When water is gathered for drinking or washing, any contaminants or infectious agents can have a direct effect on maternal health. Infections and repeated worm infections from unsafe sanitation lead to other risks such as malnutrition, stunted growth and fatal obstructed labor. And the physical strain from carrying the water is itself dangerous, resulting in a higher risk of spinal injury, uterine prolapse, rheumatism hernia and spontaneous abortion.
In some respects, Ethiopia has made important strides toward the United Nations Millennium Goals of reducing maternal mortality. Today, just over half the population has access to water, nearly four times the number in 1990. Yet the country still has a long way to go: While a woman’s lifetime risk of dying during pregnancy and childbirth is 1 in 3800 in the developed world, in Ethiopia it is 1 in 67.
WaterAid, an international non-governmental organization, is one of the groups improving access to clean water among the world’s poor, and has been working in Ethiopia since 1984. In the late afternoon light of May, villagers in Teshmale gather around a new water point constructed by the NGO. When the last of the technical difficulties has been solved, the tap is turned on and water gushes forth, first brown and then a pure, unclouded torrent.
It is the first time the children, long used to the dirty red water from the riverbeds, have seen clear water.
Mustafah Abdulaziz is a documentary photographer based in Berlin, Germany.  His ongoing project, Water, exploring water issues around the world, has received grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, commissions from the United Nations and WaterAid.

Sunday, May 11, 2014

Egypt to use 'eye-in-the-sky' to monitor their water security


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Water security in the Middle-East is of the utmost importance. In this region of the world, the use, supply, control, and allocation of water has been politically motivated, as well as a defining issue in many conflicts.
Because the Middle-East is an extremely water-scarce region, any loss of a country's water supply would impact the health of the population as well as the bio-diversity and eco-systems of the country.
In most cases, getting a fair share of the water rights from river systems running through or bordering a country is an elaborate process usually accomplished in three stages. First, a country must assert its claim to the water rights. Then they must receive recognition by the other countries who also use the waters. The final step would be a country finally attaining those water rights, but over the years, this last step has usually ended in political strife, so much so that "non-agreed" water sharing has become the reality.


Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/science/egypt-to-use-eye-in-the-sky-to-monitor-their-water-security/article/383326#ixzz31OiC7KVI

Egypt to use 'eye-in-the-sky' to monitor their water security

SHARE
 1  11  4  1 GOOGLE +2
 +
Water security in the Middle-East is of the utmost importance. In this region of the world, the use, supply, control, and allocation of water has been politically motivated, as well as a defining issue in many conflicts.

Because the Middle-East is an extremely water-scarce region, any loss of a country's water supply would impact the health of the population as well as the bio-diversity and eco-systems of the country.

In most cases, getting a fair share of the water rights from river systems running through or bordering a country is an elaborate process usually accomplished in three stages. First, a country must assert its claim to the water rights. Then they must receive recognition by the other countries who also use the waters. The final step would be a country finally attaining those water rights, but over the years, this last step has usually ended in political strife, so much so that "non-agreed" water sharing has become the reality.


Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/science/egypt-to-use-eye-in-the-sky-to-monitor-their-water-security/article/383326#ixzz31OiC7KVI