Water Security in Africa

When I was doomscrolling one day I saw a question: “Egypt has a very strong agricultural base despite being one of the driest places on Earth, and yet Ethiopia receives far more rain but grows very little. What’s your excuse guys?”

Well, Egypt is at the end of the Nile, which is fed by two major tributaries, the White Nile which originates near Lake Victoria in Sudan, and the Blue Nile which begins its life at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. Together they form a drainage basin of over three million square kilometres, about 10% of the continent[1].

Unless there are swamps and marshes to collect it, most of the rainwater either evaporates, or finds its way into streams and rivers either by running off along the surface, or by soaking into the ground and percolating, so it’s not available for agricultural use unless farmers can tap the river. In Eastern Africa, most of that rainwater ends up in the Nile and flows to Egypt.

Fig. 1 The High Aswan Dam and Lake Nassar[2].

It wouldn’t be so much use to Egypt if they didn’t have alluival plains where they could practise irrigation farming[3], and the growth of that agriculture has been maintained by the construction of the High Aswan Dam[4], which backs the water up into a reservoir in the form of Lake Nassar (Fig. 1) to provide Egypt with water all year round.
“The dam was completed in 1970 and is one of the largest earthen embankment dams in the world. When it was built the new reservoir required relocation of nearly 100,000 residents and some archaeological sites. Although the reservoir has benefited Egypt by providing power and controlling floods, it has also had detrimental effects on the Nile system. Before the dam, an estimated 110 million tons of silt was deposited by the annual flood of the Nile, enriching agricultural lands and maintaining the land of the Nile delta. Now this sediment is trapped behind the dam, requiring artificial fertilization of agricultural lands and leading to erosion and saltwater intrusion where the Nile river meets the Mediterranean Sea”[5]

So why don’t other countries upstream make arrangments to store water that falls in their countries, and use that for agriculture instead of letting it run off into streams and rivers?

The answer to this is found in the Nile River Agreement[6], which was signed in the early- and mid-1900s between Egypt and Great Britain – who at that time represented the interest of many African countries[7]. This agreement prohibits upstream countries from damming or extracting water from the river without approval from the downstream countries – which is rarely given. This agreement remains highly contentious to this day, and is a major factor in the Water Security of Africa[8]

Fig. 2 The Nile Delta from space at night, clearly showing the impact that a plentiful supply of water makes on the development of population and industry[9]. In the lower right is the Red Sea (Israel, Jordan and Lebanon) with the upper part showing a view across the Mediterranean to Cyprus.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of water in the continued development of a country, and this is evident in Fig. 2 which shows the extent to which industry and population depend on the Nile.

The availability of water from the Nile has allowed Egypt to become a major provider of agricultural products, most notably cotton, which is widely regarded as being the best in the world due to its long fibres, softness and breathability[10].

Due to the quantity of water needed to grow it, in a continent where the quality of life is severely impacted by water shortage, it has long been the subject of scrutiny in regard to its environmental impact[11].

So, if you want to buy, or not buy, Egyptian cotton how can you tell? Many product labels lay claim to their material as being ‘Egyptian Cotton’, but cotton fibres are distributed throughout the world and determining the true origin of cotton is not as straightforward as it might seem[12]…