‘Squeezing Out’ the Nile Delta’s Drainage Water to Irrigate Egypt’s Desert Land

Abstract

Egypt’s quota of Nile River water has been constant since the 1950s, despite the continual agricultural land expansion. To facilitate land reclamation, Egypt has reallocated Nile water from downstream users, mostly smallholders in the ‘old lands’ of the Delta. As water demands have grown, more attention has gone to the reuse of waste/drainage water as a reliable source for irrigated agriculture in the “old lands”. Recently, new mega plants for drainage water treatment have been built to promote reclamation of ‘new lands’ in desert-front governorates located outside the Nile Delta. Through these plants and the related water conveyance infrastructure, drainage water from the ‘old lands’ is now being collected, treated, and reallocated to these newly reclaimed areas. This article scrutinizes this transformation of access to drainage water, examining who benefits and what implications it holds for smallholder farmers in the old lands. The analysis suggests that waste/drainage water reclamation schemes do not tap into unused water but actually risk depriving smallholders in the Nile Delta of water access. It argues that more attention should be given to existing informal reuse arrangements and that smallholders’ access to water is guaranteed in light of new drainage water reuse projects.

Unveiling Pathways to Enhance Social Learning Processes in Water Struggles

“…It is worth emphasizing that such a "dialogical unity" is not necessarily one that seeks consensus building, but one that can be better characterized as an "agonistic unity" that brings together diverse actors [27]. As the Special Issue editors and article contributors make clear, water contestations take place among these diverse and often divergent actors and become apparent by reorganizing complex socio-technical, socio-material, and symbolic relations [28][29][30][31][32]. Agonistic disputes over rivers' material, socio-normative, cultural, political, and technological dimensions come together and manifest themselves in ontological arenas and disputed worldviews and epistemologies [33,34].…”

Strategic water resource management: pump stations in Fayoum City, Egypt

“…On the other hand, it is important to note that Egypt's main water resources have remained unchanged since the water agreement "Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA). " Out of the total water volume of 1,660 BCM/y that is distributed within the Nile basin, Egypt's allocation is limited to a mere 55.5 BCM/y (El-Rawy et al, 2020;Tawfik et al, 2023), accounting for approximately 97% of the country's renewable water resources (Hefny and Amer, 2005;Damkjaer and Taylor, 2017;El-Rawy et al, 2020;Salem et al, 2021).…”