Surface water in Egypt
The Aswan Dam:
My blog centralises climate change because I believe that groundwater in the past has often been underrepresented in discussions of solutions for combating the effects of climate change on food and water. This is not however to say that surface water is not also critical to the story of food and water in Africa. Differing regions have differing characteristics, some of which can be favourable towards surface water and vice versa. Therefore, I will not neglect the importance of surface water and this post serves as a testament to this.
A key example that comes to mind when thinking about surface water in Africa is Egypt – a country that is much more dependent on surface water than it is groundwater and resultantly has its most substantial infrastructures based around surface water. However, Egypt is not alone and there is diversity in other countries that too depend on surface water such as countries centred around the River Zambezi including Zambia, Angola and Namibia. In this post I will focus specifically on the case study of Egypt but emphasise that Egypt is being used as one specific example and is not alone.
Firstly, it is important to remember that food and water can be linked by more ways than just irrigation and the rearing of cattle. A key example of this is fish. In the Nile Basin for example, there are over 800 fish species with 128 of these belonging to the river Nile alone (Witte et al, 2009). Freshwater fisheries in Egypt such as the River Nile, the Aswan High Dam, irrigation canals and Lake Nassar are all important sources of food in Egypt. This is epitomised as 69.4 million mullet were caught in Egypt in 2005, equating to 156,000 tonnes of fish which represents 29% of the Egypt’s aquaculture production (Saleh, 2008).
A key example of surface water in Egypt is the Aswan Dam in Video 2 below which satisfies just under 50% of the country’s energy demands whilst allowing for reliable year round irrigation (Oven-Thompson, 1982). The Aswan Dam is built across the Nile and represents the world’s largest embankment dam. The construction of this dam allows surface water to be stored and released to meet demand at different times of the year. For example, the cropping patterns and climate of Egypt require high releases of water from the Dam in the summer months as this is when agricultural production is at its peak.
The Dam has significant benefits for food and water in Egypt as it has allowed for the improvement of summer rotations (Zeid, 2007). The dam therefore provides a guaranteed availability of freshwater for irrigation in predetermined periods of agricultural production (Zeid, 2007). This provides stability to the water supply year-round and mitigates against the negative impacts of water distribution and seasonal rainfall that I have discussed in previous blog posts. As a result of this water storage, the Aswan Dam has led to an expansion in rice cultivation and agricultural land has expanded by 1.2 million acres since its introduction (Zeid, 2007).
However, the Dam is not perfect and has some negative impacts to Egypt’s food supply. The impounding of the Niles water led to the creation of Lake Nasser, as seen in Video 2, and although the lake houses fish such as Tilapia, it has had severely negative impacts on local Sardine populations (Zeid, 2007). Sardines that breed around the Niles estuaries “have almost disappeared” as a result of the mineral rich silts they require being obstructed and deposited behind the dam (Zeid, 2007: 156). This has led to the annual catch of sardines drastically falling by 20,000 tonnes annually which can have many negative impacts on food production that is related to Sardines (Zeid, 2007).
Nevertheless, it is commonly argued that the use of the Aswan Dam to store surface water has had an overwhelmingly positive impact on the production of food in Egypt. Although there are negatives, the Dam has led to the creation of 1.2 million more acres of agricultural land whilst continuing to regulate water supply to these areas. To put that into perspective that is approximately the area of 19.2 million tennis courts. In this post I therefore hope to have demonstrated the importance of surface water for food and water in Africa. More specifically, I have demonstrated its importance in Egypt but also highlighted that many other countries rely heavily on surface water across Africa too.
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