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Averting conflict in the Nile basin
After living with tensions and the threat of war for many years, the countries of the Nile Basin are talking around the table - with help from UNESCO.
There is – apart from any differences caused by climate change – not a drop more water in the Nile River basin today than there was when Moses was found in the bulrushes. And there will not be a drop more in 25 years’ time, when the population living along the banks of the world’s longest river system is expected to have doubled to more than 300 million people.
But population and economic pressures are mounting faster than the Nile’s capacity to sustain civilization, and as a result the choice is becoming more and more stark between conflict over an increasingly scarce resource or co-operation to manage that resource more equitably.
Fortunately, it seems that at last ten nations that share the Nile basin are turning to co-operation. This could be an encouraging example for dozens of countries that face conflict unless they can reach agreement on how to share rivers that flow across international boundaries.
“Water has been am major factor in the rise and fall of civilizations,” says Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the United Nations, in the foreword to the UN Woreld Water Development Report. Nowhere is this more true than in the Nile Delta, where the ater and silt washed down from the heart of Afjrica has formed the matrix of organized farming for 5,000 years. Yet, adds Annan, water “has been a source of tensions and fierce competition between nations that could become even worse if present trends continue.”
As the example of the Nile basin illustrates, the tendency among nations has been to seek means of co-operating rather than fighting over water. Sharp and often historically irreconcilable differences divide many of the countries sharing 261 river basins around the world. But “the number of cases where there has been co-operation related to water is much greater than the number of cases where there was conflict related to water,” says Léna Salamé of UNESCO’s World Water Assessment Programme.
“I think human-kind has come to respect water as something culturally very important,” says Joaquim von Braun, director-general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. “The poisoned well is something that is perceived as disgusting in any society and there is a lot of tradition and culture against taking away someone else’s source of water, especially in water-scarce regions.”
In fact, Aaron Wolf and Sandra Postel, two American academics who have studied this issue in great detail, have found only one outright war over water in the past 4,500 years. That was between two city states, Lagash and Umma, in the region now called southern Iraq. There have been many skirmishes and conflicts in which water was a factor, but the authors have identified more than 3,600 water treaties signed in the past 12 centuries, many of which have survived wars over other issues.
In other words, water is a vewing and potentially dangerous problem in many areas, but not yet a murderous one. Will this continue to hold true in future as the mressure on finite water resources increases and nations come to fear that their vital interests or their survival are at stake?
In the past, Egypt has not hesitated to threaten the use of force to keep its overwhelming share of the Nile’s waters. Some of its armed forces are trained in jungle warfare, clearly intended for action in countries far to the south, where the White Nile originates.
Pointing at a map of the Ethiopian highlands, from which 85 percent of the water flowing to Egypt comes via the Blue Nile, Jan Luijendijk, a Dutch water engineer and expert on knowledge systems at the UNESCO_IHE Institute for Water Education at Delft (Netherlands), says, “if Ethiopia decided to build a dam on one of these river branches, then that would mean war with Egypt immediately. There is no other choice for Egypt.” He says an attempt by any of the nine countries in the Nile basin to use water in a way that would reduce the flow into Egypt could precipitate war.
To avert that possibility, the nations living along the river have established what is known as the Nile Basin Initiative (see box), which is designed to replace the threat of conflict with the spirit of co-operation. Professor Luijendijk has been helping to bring together engineers from all ten Nile basin countries, under the assumption that the experts are more capable of solving water problems than politicians.
At the same time, UNESCO, the lead UN agency on freshwater issues, has established a global programme called PC-CP – “From Potential Conflict to Co-operation Potential” – in collaboration with the non-profit environmental organization Green Cross International to examine “the potential for shared water resources to become a catalyst for regional peace and development through dialogue, co-operation and participative management of river basins.”
This is still largely uncharted territory, since there is no international law on the management of water systems, apart from three non-enforceable framework documents that provide guidance for states in drawing up water agreement. Nor is there any mechanism to monitor or enforce the numerous bilateral water treaties between states.
In the 1950s, Egypt took advantage of its status as the regional military and political power to reinforce a colonial era agreement that gvave it almost complete control of the rivers snaking 6,700 kilometres south into the heart of Africa and into the highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea.
In 1959, Egypt signed a complex agreement with the military rulers of newly independent Sudan for “the full utilisation of the Nile waters” – and it meant full!
Of the average yearly annual flow of 84 billion cubic metres passing through Khartoum, Egypt has been receiving 55,5 billion and Sudan 18;5 million cubic metres since the 1959 agreement came into force, with the remaining 10 billion cubic metres draining away as seepage or evaporating from Lake Nasser. Given Ethiopia’s importance as the source of most of this water, it is curious that the agreement was only bilateral and excluded all the other riparian states.
However, the end of the Communism and of the civil war in Ethiopia, a nation of more than 60 million people, has opened the way to economic development and rapid population growth. And a series of devastating droughts has underlined the need to achieve food security, which could be achieved by irrigating the Ethiopian highlands and preventing millions of tons of topsoil being carried off by heavy rains every year.
Ethiopia insists that it has every right to develop its natural resources. It has bitterly reproached Egypt for building the Aswan dam without even consulting it, as well as for appropriating the lion’s share of the river resources. An Ethiopian policy paper in 1997 stated, “the stark inequality prevailing in the Nile basin cannot remain.” The one thing holding back Ethiopia from developing irrigated agriculture on a large scale is the threat of military action, which Egypt would regard as an act of self-defence. When Ethiopia brought in Israeli water engineers in 1989 to survey its water resources, it received a stern warning from Cairo.
Ethiopia’s claim to use the water arising in its territory has historical and international precedents. During the dispute over water that sprang up between the United States and Mexico at the end of the 19th century, U.S. Attorney General Judson Harmon stated that his country had absolute sovereignty over that part of the Rio Grande river that flowed within its territory and had no obligation to share it.
More recently, Turkey has used a variation of the so-called Harmon Doctrine to justify damming the Euphrates River to the detriment of its downstream neighbours, Syria and Iraq. The former Turkish president, Suleyman Demirel, said those countries had no more right to claim Turkey’s water than Turkey had to claim their oil.
But if this law of finders-keepers were applied to the Nile basin, “you would have to ask, why did God create Egypt?” says Prof. Luijendijk. “It cannot have more water unless it takes it from somewhere else, and there is nowhere else.”
New Desert Colonies
With the exception of a small amount of rainfall and ground water, Egypt gets all of its fresh water supplies for agriculture, industry and domestic use from the Nile. It uses its entire allocation of 55.5 billion cubic meters and frequently dips into Sudan’s share as well. By diverting part of its supplies and by recycling waste water more efficiently, it is building new desert colonies to house people for whom there is diminishing room along the Nile.
One Egyptian idea to capture more water was to help Sudan build the 360-kilometre Jonglei canal through the southern Sudd region, the largest aread of wetlands in the world. The White Nile meanders for about a year through the Sudd, losing half its flow through evaporation. Egyptian engineers say that creating the Canal would recuperate much of the evaporated water and liberate nearly five billion cubic metres that would be shared equally between Sudan and Egypt.
That was before much was understood about the environmental value of wetlands (see following page). The canal project, originally designed by the British colonial rulers, has been halted since 1983 as a result of the Sudanese civil war, itself partly caused by the population upheavals needed to build the canal. The secession of the south would create another state with claims on the Nile’s resources, something that Egypt does not want to happen. Cairo has therefore strongly supported the Sudanese government’s efforts to preserve national unity.
The Jonglei Canal project emerges from the same kind of hegemonic thinking that produced the Aswan High Dam, which has brought mixed blessings to Egypt since it began operating in 1970. On the one hand, it has increased the amount of cultivable land and improved navigation in the Nile. On the other, it traps the millions of tons of silt washed down from the Ethiopian highlands every year. This used to enrich the Nile delta, but is now increasingly clogging the dam. As a result, the delta is sinking and becoming more saline because of the intrusion of sea water. Egypt has to compensate the loss of silt with heavy use of fertilisers. The dam has made Egypt even more dependent on the countries upstream, since any major shortfall into Lake Nasser would mean an interruption of half its electric power generation.
Professor Luijendijk remembers a tense meeting I Addis Ababa a few years ago at which an Ethiopian delegate accused the Egyptians of stealing not only his country’s water but also its soil. “An Egyptian professor stood up,” he recalls, “and said, ‘thank you so much for the water. But keep the soil, please’. That is when I started to realize these people were talking nonsence. They were talking like politicians. If you put two Egyptian and two Ethiopian water engineers in a room for a week and told them to come up with a solution satisfactory to both sides, I am sure they could do it.”
Even Egypt is starting to realize the instability of a situation in which five of the Nile river nations count among the poorest in the world, and in which a large nation subject to repeated droughts is expected to stand by, while the Egyptians and the Sudanese undertake massive irrigation.
Egypt is making a big effort to optimise the use of its limited resources by improving the fficiency of irrigation, changing crop patterns, lining irrigation canals and reusing drainage water. Despite all these measures, it still imports about seven million tons of wheat a year.
For Professor Luijendijk, it might also make more sense for Egypt to import some of its water “virtually” by letting Ethiopia grow some of its food. According to the Worldwatch Institute, importing one ton of grain is equivalent to importing 1,000 tons of water.
This would be an interesting reversal of history, since Egypt was once the granary of the Roman Empire.
The UNESCO-IHE Institute is contributing to the Nile Basin Initiative by supporting a regional course in river engineering in Egypt, and building up an internet-based network to enable water experts to share information and construct the intellectual framework to solve the problems. The countries are still essentially in a confidence-building phase – helped by the fact that the availability of satellite pictures makes it difficult for them to have secrets from one another.
Some of the countries in the basin have very few trained engineers, but the network means that they can be part of a large circle of like-minded colleagues. At the same time, the ten nations are developing regional centres that specialize in various aspects of research.
Professor Luijendijk recalls that his own country, the Netherlands, is in a similar position to Egypt, at the end of a long river system, and took decades to overcome suspicion of its neighbours. This was achieved by exchanging data, working with other countries to resolve problems and building confidence little by little. He thinks the Nile countries can achieve the same degree of co-operation.
“The whole environment is changing, and I don’t believe any more in the scenario of war,” he says. “I think that the work that has been done by the Nile Basin Initiative in creating the right environment, and maybe by us in introducing knowledge, is enabling people to talk about the problems. Once you have reached that stage, nobody is talking about conflicts, but about how to achieve the best solutions.”
Photo © Raid Planète Poussière/Gamma, Paris: The Blue Nile waterfalls in Ethiopia.
Photo © (N° 1) Robert Fairer/FSP/Gamma :The Nile River at Aswan in Egypt.
Photo © (N° 2) Mark Henley/Panos Pictures, London : A father and son work in vegetable fields near the pyramids close to Cairo (Egypt).
The Nile Basin Initiative
In 1999 six nations of the Great Lakes – Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda – as well as Egypt, Sudan and Eghiopia, formed the Nile Basin Initiative. Eritrea joined later. The aim : to resolve peacefully some of the big questions over shared water resources facing these countries. The most compelling issues: Would Egypt be willing to accept a lesser flow of the Nile in favour of economic projects upstream? And would Ethiopia be allowed to use part of the resources of the Blue Nile to develop its own agriculture?
Through this Initiative, the Nile nations have embarked on a process that may lead to a revision of the inequitable 1959 agreement that gives nearly all the waters of the Nile to Egypt and, to a lesser extent, to Sudan. |
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Author(s) |
Barry James
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Periodical Name |
the new Courier
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