Part 13 (1/2)

Thicker Than Blood: The Water-Famished Middle East One of the front lines of the world's unfolding freshwater crisis is the historically water-fragile Middle East and North Africa-the heartland of Arab Islamic civilization and cradle of the ancient hydraulic irrigation civilizations that arose in the flooding river valleys of the Fertile Crescent. The politically volatile, overpopulated, dry land stretching from Algeria, Libya, Egypt throughout the Arabian Peninsula into Israel, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, and their regional neighbors, is rife with water tensions, conflicts, and troubled states that hold the potential to combust into a full-fledged water war.

The Middle East is the first major region in modern world history to run out of water. Country after country lacks the freshwater to grow enough crops to feed its population or to provide the basis for long-term rising living standards; per person measures of renewable water availability are widely below the minimum standard measures of scarcity and famine. The desert nations of the Arabian Peninsula and Libya, as well as arid Israel and Palestine, outgrew their internal water resources for sustainable food self-sufficiency in the 1950s. Jordan ran out of water in the 1960s, Egypt in the 1970s, and other regions more recently. The Millennium Ecosystem a.s.sessment reported that in ”the Middle East and North Africa, humans use 120% of renewable supplies.” They survive by importing growing volumes of food-virtual water-and, where available, by pumping water out of underground aquifers faster than nature can recharge them. Only the bonanza of surging oil income from the early 1970s has staved off a full-blown crisis. Oil wealth paid for the quadrupling of Middle East wheat flour imports to over 40 million tons within a single generation. For most of Middle Eastern and North African history, exploitation of subsurface water deposits had been limited mainly to the excavation of shallow wells and qanats, the horizontal tunnels of antiquity that conveyed water from inside hillsides. Oil opened a new era by facilitating the large-scale subsidization of modern pumping of deep aquifer water for irrigation.

Yet if oil built modern Middle East society, water holds the key to its future. In the end the region cannot escape the same water-fragile geography and stream deficit that shaped its ancient and Islamic civilizations, placed a ceiling on its indigenous, sustainable population size, and ultimately influenced Islam's abrupt decline from glory from the twelfth century. Modern engineering of the region's surface waters began in earnest in the nineteenth century. Irrigation and cheap oil energy metamorphosed the traditional population-resource equation underlying each society. From 1950 to 2008, the population more than quadrupled to 364 million. But country after country soon began to exceed the productive limits of the region's water resources and waterworks capabilities. With population forecast to swell another 63 percent to 600 million by 2050, the Islamic Middle East is becoming a demographic volcano. The region's upsurge in violence, radical religious fundamentalism, and terrorism is likely but a foretaste of what potentially lies ahead as its water famine worsens.

Egypt, the most populous Arab state with 75 million inhabitants in 2006 and projected to reach nearly 100 million within a generation, is being stretched to its breaking point. As it had been since the time of the ancient Pharaohs, the Nile is still by far the paramount factor governing the destiny of Egyptian society. But ever since the completion of the high dam at Aswan in 1971, how the river did so has changed entirely. The giant, multipurpose Aswan Dam utterly transformed the hydrology of the Nile from a miraculous natural phenomenon to a totally managed irrigation channel, and produced copious hydroelectricity for an underpowered nation. The dam fulfilled the dream of 5,000 years by delivering to an Egyptian leader absolute control over the Nile's domestic flow and the power to insulate Egyptians from the dreaded traumas of the river's periodic episodes of extreme droughts and floods. Yet for all its majestic power, the Aswan Dam has not been able to alter one other historical feature of the Nile: nearly every drop of it originates outside Egypt's borders, while the well-being of Egyptian society depends upon consuming a vastly disproportionate share of the Nile basin's water. Beyond upstream Sudan, the countries of equatorial East Africa's great lake plateau provide the sources of the White Nile. By far the biggest contributor of Egypt's water is highland Ethiopia, whose Blue Nile, Atbara, and Sobat rivers supply some 85 percent of the water, and all the silt, that arrives every June at Aswan. Throughout history, impoverished Ethiopia and the White Nile river states have sipped only a tiny fraction of the Nile's water for their own economic development. To alleviate their grinding poverty, they are now determined to use more. In 1989, then Egyptian foreign minister and later U.N. secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali summed up Egypt's geopolitical dilemma to the U.S. Congress: ”The national security of Egypt is in the hands of the eight other African countries in the Nile basin.”

Modern Middle East Israel & West Bank [image]

Paranoid fears about Nile water cutoffs by upstream nations, particularly Ethiopia, have been ingrained in the Egyptian psyche for many centuries, and at times became feverish, one example being when ma.s.s famine in 1200 caused by disastrous, low floods killed one-third of Cairo's population. Verdi played upon this angst in Aida Aida by featuring two tragic lovers caught up in a war between Egypt and Ethiopia; in 18751876 his story was partly enacted as a b.l.o.o.d.y reality when Egyptian soldiers were annihilated by 60,000 Ethiopian troops after making several disastrous imperialistic forays into Ethiopian territory. The triumphant achievement of the Aswan Dam, ironically, exacerbated Egypt's national security fears by whetting their poor, upstream neighbors' desire to utilize more Nile waters for giant dams of their own. Thus, while most of the world viewed Egyptian policy through the lens of the Suez Ca.n.a.l and the Arab-Israelis wars, Egyptian leaders themselves were clear-sightedly focused on their own overriding national security objective-safeguarding their disproportionate consumption of Nile waters-and enlarging the river's overall available flow at Aswan. In May 1978, just prior to making his historic peace treaty with Israel, and with a telescoped eye on Ethiopia, Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat declared with typical bluntness: ”We depend upon the Nile 100 percent in our life, so if anyone, at any moment thinks to deprive us of our life we shall never hesitate to go to war because it is a matter of life or death.” by featuring two tragic lovers caught up in a war between Egypt and Ethiopia; in 18751876 his story was partly enacted as a b.l.o.o.d.y reality when Egyptian soldiers were annihilated by 60,000 Ethiopian troops after making several disastrous imperialistic forays into Ethiopian territory. The triumphant achievement of the Aswan Dam, ironically, exacerbated Egypt's national security fears by whetting their poor, upstream neighbors' desire to utilize more Nile waters for giant dams of their own. Thus, while most of the world viewed Egyptian policy through the lens of the Suez Ca.n.a.l and the Arab-Israelis wars, Egyptian leaders themselves were clear-sightedly focused on their own overriding national security objective-safeguarding their disproportionate consumption of Nile waters-and enlarging the river's overall available flow at Aswan. In May 1978, just prior to making his historic peace treaty with Israel, and with a telescoped eye on Ethiopia, Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat declared with typical bluntness: ”We depend upon the Nile 100 percent in our life, so if anyone, at any moment thinks to deprive us of our life we shall never hesitate to go to war because it is a matter of life or death.”

From the dawn of ancient Egyptian civilization, farming along the Nile had operated unchanged as a natural, one crop, seasonal basin agricultural system able to support a peak population of 4 to 5 million. That ceiling had doubled in the nineteenth century with the introduction of barrages and year-round, multicrop irrigation. Under the advances of British hydrologists after 1882, population soared again. It was 25 million on the eve of the Aswan high dam's opening.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the British-built low Aswan Dam perpetuated the Nile basin's natural, self-sustaining irrigation system by permitting the pa.s.sage of silt during flood season, while also protecting Egypt for the first time from disastrously large inundations. Yet the dam's reservoir system was too small to store enough water to deliver Egypt from multiyear droughts. In the ensuing decades, British water engineers conceived plans for ma.s.sive storage dams in highland lake plateaus of equatorial East Africa and at Lake Tana in Ethiopia where evaporation rates are low. They also attempted to augment the Nile's total flow by building a long diversion ca.n.a.l to bypa.s.s the huge, stagnant Sudd swamps in British-controlled southern Sudan, where the White Nile loses half its volume to evaporation. But when the era of British hegemony yielded to national independence after World War II, Britain's ambitious Nile plumbing projects were still mostly unfulfilled. With the end of British rule, the basin devolved politically into a fractious cl.u.s.ter of impoverished watershed states unable to undertake cooperative Nile development. The positive sum potential of maximizing the river's productive resources through optimal, nonpoliticized, placement of waterworks vanished with it.

The father of the Aswan Dam, Egyptian president Na.s.ser, had come to power in 1952 with the transcendent dream that a giant dam at Aswan would, at a single stroke, give Egypt economic control of the Nile waters, insulate it from the caprices of nature and the disruptive political machinations of upstream Nile nations, deliver food security and economic modernization, and restore the independent, sovereign glory of Egyptian and Arab civilization. When American secretary of state Dulles withdrew his previous support, Na.s.ser had in 1956 signed a deal with the Soviet Union to build the high dam, which quickly became the incarnate symbol of swelling Egyptian patriotism and a new political phenomenon, pan-Arabism. Although the Soviets desired to make a successful Aswan a beckoning symbol of socialist possibility for the entire third world, the first two years after construction began in 1960 seemed to confirm Dulles's doubt that the Russians had the technical proficiency to meet the challenge. The dam fell behind schedule; despite the availability of a large, cheap Egyptian workforce, less than 10 percent of the rock and sand needed to fill it had been excavated. Na.s.ser got the project on track, however, by breaking his pledge to the Russians and buying superior Western construction equipment to finish the job.

Na.s.ser did not live to see the completion of the Aswan Dam. He died five months before its official opening in January 1971. By 1975 it became fully operational. The high dam itself was a landmark engineering achievement, and influential political symbol of hope for Egypt and newly independent third world nations everywhere. Standing over 360 feet high and sweeping in a great curve for over two miles, it was the world's highest rock-filled dam. If it were ever to burst, the torrential cascade downstream would strike with the destructive fury of a biblical plague, obliterating modern Egyptian civilization in its path. Its immense, 344-mile-long, eight-mile-wide Lake Na.s.ser reservoir, which submerged land and ancient monuments and displaced over 100,000 inhabitants of southern Egypt and Sudan's Nubia as it filled, stored over two times the average annual flow of the Nile. With some 30 times more storage capacity than the low dam it replaced, it protected Egypt for the first time in history against both extremes of drought and flood. Its 12 generators produced half of Egypt's electricity when it opened. The effective gain in controlled Nile flow increased cultivated watered-desert cropland by 20 percent, as well as more extensive double and triple cropping on existing farmland. The ultimate proof of the dam's success was that from the time it opened to 2005, Egypt's population tripled to 74 million.

Critics who warned that it was the wrong dam at the wrong place due to its many technical and environmental drawbacks were drowned out in the triumphal nationalism. Na.s.ser's insistence that it be located in the scorching desert on Egyptian national territory, for instance, caused its giant reservoir to lose a huge amount to evaporation-12 percent of the Nile's estimated average 84 billion cubic meter flow at Aswan. The high dam also blocked the pa.s.sage of fertilizing silt, transforming the Nile from a natural, self-sustaining irrigation system to an artificially managed river totally dependent on heavy chemical fertilizer and for the first time p.r.o.ne to salinization and waterlogging. Due to the dam, the natural Nile of history died at Aswan. Like America's Colorado, the Egyptian Nile became a glorified irrigation ditch in which every drop was regulated. But when the dam opened with fanfare in the 1970s such problems were but an afterthought. They were left for future generations to contend with.

Indeed, Na.s.ser's monumental legacy at Aswan seemed immediately providential by insulating Egypt from the terrible regional drought of 19791988 that resulted from the lowest Niles of the twentieth century. At a time when over a million upriver Ethiopians and an unknown number of Sudanese died of famine, Egypt's growth continued unabated. During the decade-long drought, the average volume of Nile water reaching Aswan plunged 40 percent below normal. By July 1988, Lake Na.s.ser contained so little water that it was within a dozen feet of reaching the total shutoff levels for the dam's hydroelectric turbines, and was able to produce less than one-fifth of Egypt's needs, forcing the country to rely more heavily on costly fossil fuels. Most alarming of all, Egypt was down to its last seven months' reserve of irrigation water. Then, in August 1988, heavy rains providentially began to pour down in Ethiopia and Sudan. The great drought ended with the highest Nile flood of the century. Over the next few years, the man-made lake behind Aswan began gradually to refill. Egypt was saved.

The great 1980s Nile drought, and the humanitarian tragedy it wreaked on Egypt's southern neighbors, highlighted Egypt's paramount national security priority in securing its near-monopolistic usage of Nile waters and the Aswan Dam's linchpin role in delivering it. At the same time, it painfully exposed the dam's military vulnerability, and the unimaginable devastation that would occur if its towering barrier were breeched in an attack. This double-edged geopolitical reality of the dam was pivotal to the historic decision of Na.s.ser's successor, Anwar el-Sadat, to boldly break Arab taboo by traveling to Jerusalem and set the stage for signing the 1979 peace treaty with despised enemy Israel. Egypt had been the key Arab military leader in the wars with Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, and, under Sadat's presidency, 1973. Yet despite some initial military success, Egypt saw the latter war end with Israel again astride the Suez Ca.n.a.l and holding enough air power superiority to make its rumored readiness since 1967 to bomb the Aswan Dam a palpable threat.

Although it infuriated his Arab brethen, Sadat's strategic decision to make peace with Israel brilliantly secured Egypt's paramount national security interest over the waters of the Nile. At a stroke, it earned Egypt a diplomatic windfall of international goodwill, made it the second largest recipient (after Israel) of U.S. foreign aid, safeguarded the Dam, the Suez Ca.n.a.l and Egyptian territory against Israeli attack, and freed Egypt to redirect its otherwise superior regional military and diplomatic muscle to a.s.sert its commanding influence over developments in the vital Nile basin. Upon making peace with Israel, Sadat in 1979 famously highlighted Egypt's s.h.i.+ft in national security focus by declaring, ”The only matter that could take Egypt to war again is water.” He even briefly broached the idea of a peace pipeline to bring a small amount of Nile water to Palestine and Israel, in an effort to ease water tensions and facilitate peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

In his memoirs of the period, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Sadat's minister for foreign affairs, explicitly confirmed, ”Preserving Nile waters for Egypt was not only an economic and hydrological issue but a question of national survival...Our security depended on the south more than on the east, in spite of Israel's military power.”

Sadat's strategic focus on the Nile's water was also informed by strident declarations of intent to dam the headwaters of the Blue Nile from Ethiopia's new communist military leader, Mengistu Haile Mariam, who had seized power in 1974. Adding to Sadat's unease was that Israel had been sending military support to Ethiopia throughout the 1970s to help it battle internal and neighboring rivals and that the two nations had long-standing affinities through Judaism, history, and a suspicion of Egypt. In the late 1950s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation began surveying Ethiopia's immense, untapped, hydraulic potential at the behest of Emperor Haile Sela.s.sie. Still stinging from Na.s.ser's alliance with the Soviets on Aswan, America's Cold War leaders had been happy to oblige. The result was an exhaustive, 17-volume bureau report identifying over two dozen irrigation and hydroelectric power projects, the latter with the potential to generate three times the hydropower of Aswan. By capturing and storing Blue Nile and tributary waters in the cool Ethiopian highlands where evaporation loss was only one-third as great as at Aswan, the bureau concluded, Ethiopian projects could vastly boost the region's hydroelectric output and actually increase the overall available net downstream flow to Sudan and Egypt. In theory, it seemed like a win-win situation for all countries. But it put Ethiopia, not Egypt, in ultimate control of the amount of water reaching Aswan-precisely the nightmare that had haunted Egyptians for centuries. Egypt would have none of it. Desperately poor Ethiopia could not finance such ambitious projects itself. Through its far superior international diplomatic political influence, Egypt wielded an effective veto over Ethiopia's multilateral financing and other potential avenues of water development it didn't abide.

Despite the fact that Ethiopia was the source of four-fifths of the waters of the Egyptian Nile, Egypt claimed an historic right of prior use over the lion's share of the river's volume. Upon launching the Aswan Dam project in 1956, Na.s.ser had simultaneously moved to try to secure a Nile water sharing agreement with its southern neighbor, newly independent Sudan, within whose border part of the Aswan reservoir had to be situated. In late 1958, he found an accommodating negotiating partner in a kindred military Islamic leader who had just seized power in Sudan.

The result was the Nile Waters Agreement of 1959. With breathtaking audacity, the accord divided up all the waters of the Nile between Egypt and Sudan: Egypt got three-quarters, or 55.5 billion cubic meters, of the estimated available flow after evaporation; Sudan received one-quarter, or 18.5 billion cubic meters, which, at the time, was far more than it could use. So Egypt effectively got use of the bonanza. The 1959 agreement totally excluded the water claims of Ethiopia and the seven other upriver states-it was, in effect, a Muslim Arab solution involuntarily imposed upon the sub-Saharan Nile basin. Moreover, Egypt and Sudan agreed to move jointly against upstream nations that acted to challenge them. Ethiopia, which used but 1 percent of the Nile basin's water, vociferously rejected the treaty's validity. In 1956 and in 1957 Sela.s.sie had obtained public declarations of support for Ethiopia's Nile water rights from American president Eisenhower and vice president Richard Nixon, respectively. Yet in practice Ethiopia was powerless to prevent Egypt's water grab. In the late 1970s, these tensions flared into bellicose exchanges between Sadat and Sela.s.sie's communist successor, Mengitsu. Sadat nakedly threatened military reprisals if Ethiopia dared touch the waters of the Nile. The Arabic press in Egypt was soon aflame with anti-Ethiopian rhetoric, including menacing revisionist interpretations of the prophet Muhammad's well-known directive to Muslims to leave Christian Ethiopia alone because its Axumite king had granted refuge to his early followers when they were forced to flee Mecca in AD 615.

Ancient, proud, and never occupied or colonized, Ethiopia's civilization dated back to the days of the Pharaohs. It was to the Ethiopian Land of Punt in the Horn of Africa that Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut in the fifteenth century BC sent her famous Red Sea expedition that brought back myrrh and live frankincense trees. Ethiopian lore told that King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba's son brought the Ark of the Covenant to Axum in northern Ethiopia for safekeeping, where it purportedly remains under guard to this day. The Axumite Empire rose to prominence as an important link in the sea trade that Greek sailors opened around 100 BC between Egypt and India; at its peak its borders reached to southern Egypt and crossed the Red Sea into the Arabian Peninsula. The empire adopted Christianity in the same period of Roman Emperor Constantine's conversion and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church maintained close ties to the Christian Copts in Alexandria until the mid-twentieth century. Despite Muhammad's goodwill, Ethiopia began to decline after the seventh century as Islamic sailors took over more and more of the best trade routes to India and the Orient. From the mid-twelfth to early sixteenth centuries, Ethiopia underwent a golden period of expansion and revival, which put renewed emphasis on its linkages to Jerusalem, King Solomon, and its destiny as the legitimate successor to the Israelities. But by the late twentieth century, it was one of the world's poorest countries with life expectancies of only fifty-three years. The extremely difficult, hydrological conditions on its highland plateaus were one of its most formidable obstacles to economic development. Rains were seasonal and varied unpredictably, while the flash nature of the muddy Blue Nile, which roiled torrentially a hundred feet high in its gorges in wet season and trickled almost uselessly in dry season, made dam control, bridge building, and other waterworks highly complicated, and several times costlier than comparable projects in gentler, temperate, and invariably richer nations.

The confrontation between Ethiopia and Egypt abated after Sadat was a.s.sa.s.sinated in 1981 by Muslim fundamentalists. The new Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, pursued the more conciliatory approach long advocated by a senior Egyptian adviser, Boutros-Ghali, who favored joint, cooperative development of the Nile basin in order to derive its positive sum potential of increased storage capacity, reduced evaporation loss, untapped hydroelectricity, and, above all, more Nile water for irrigation.

Despite Egypt's more diplomatic tone, all the Nile basin plans and technological and financial a.s.sistance it offered remained inviolably predicated upon the other river states' acquiescence to the one-sided 1959 Nile Waters Agreement, and gave Egypt an overgenerous share of all new water supply. Political and environmental obstacles also impeded the Nile basin development that was undertaken. Work on the 224-mile-long Egypt-Sudan diversion ca.n.a.l to nearly double White Nile flow by re-rerouting southern Sudan's huge Sudd swamps was abruptly terminated in 1984 with only 70 percent excavated when it was attacked by black, southern civil war rebels who regarded it as a disenfranchising theft of a vital local natural resource and climate regulator for the benefit of Sudan's northern Muslim rulers and their Egyptian ally. In early 1990 Egypt blocked an African Development Bank loan for Ethiopia over concerns that it would consume too much water. Not surprisingly, Boutros-Ghali's Nile diplomacy yielded no major breakthroughs. The decade ended almost as it had begun. When Boutros-Ghali learned that Israeli hydrologists and engineers were doing feasibility studies on a number of dam sites in Ethiopia, with the potential to store as much as half the volume of water reaching Aswan, he summoned Ethiopia's amba.s.sador to the foreign office in Cairo in November 1989 and sternly warned that any damming of the Blue Nile would be taken as an act of war by Egypt unless it had its consent.

Another cycle of water diplomacy began auspiciously in the early 1990s. Egypt and a new democratic government in Ethiopia led by Meles Zenawi agreed in principle that Ethiopia was ent.i.tled to an equitable share of Nile waters and to work cooperatively on Nile development. In 1999 Nile countries launched the World Banksupported Nile Basin Initiative, a model in use in many international river basins around the world. Yet the real motivation behind the diplomacy was Egypt's own ambitious plans to water its desert to ease the explosive population pressures building along its narrow, fertile Nile corridor. In 1997 it had inaugurated the controversial twenty-year New Valley Project, a large water transfer scheme akin to the one that helped transform Southern California in the 1920s and 1930s that required the diversion of an additional 5 billion cubic meters from Lake Na.s.ser through an ancient channel of the Nile-water Egypt did not have and which it needed the cooperation of upriver states to obtain. To entice Ethiopia's cooperation, Egypt offered support for Ethiopian hydropower dams, terracing of Ethiopia's highlands that improved water usage, augmented river flows, and reduced troublesome silt loads arriving at Aswan, and for some small-scale irrigation projects. But any water storage that significantly enlarged Ethiopia's capacity to expand its less than 1 percent of irrigated farmland was still not open to serious negotiation.

By 2005, with one in eight Ethiopians in need of international food relief, Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi was angrily protesting Egypt's monopoly on large-scale Nile irrigation and threatening to unilaterally divert its waters for Ethiopia's benefit. ”While Egypt is taking the Nile water to transform the Sahara Desert into something green, we in Ethiopia-who are the source of 85% of that water-are denied the possibility of using it to feed ourselves,” he declared. ”I think it is an open secret that the Egyptians have troops that are specialized in jungle warfare. Egypt is not known for its jungles...From time to time Egyptian presidents have threatened countries with military action if they move...If Egypt were to plan to stop Ethiopia from utilizing the Nile waters it would have to occupy Ethiopia and no country on Earth has done that in the past.” Ominously, Meles added, ”The current regime cannot be sustained. It's being sustained because of the diplomatic clout of Egypt. Now, there will come a time when the people of East Africa and Ethiopia will become too desperate to care about these diplomatic niceties. Then, they are going to act.”

It seems unrealistic that Egypt can long maintain its historical hegemony over the waters of the Nile at the expense of widespread poverty, malnutrition, humanitarian crises, and oppressive, dysfunctional government among a fast-growing population of several hundred million Africans upriver. Two of the most horrific genocides in recent times, in Rwanda and Sudan, occurred in Nile basin states. Burundi, like Ethiopia, is one of the three poorest nations in the world, and the Horn of Africa is a war-torn wreckage of failed states and recurring famine. The Nile is these nations' greatest natural a.s.set for development, too. Ethiopia, for instance, has unlocked a mere 3 percent of its hydropower potential. Often heralded as the future breadbasket of Africa, and encompa.s.sing over three-fifths of the Nile basin, Sudan is irrigating only 1 percent of its arable land. It defied history that, pressured by dire necessities, Egypt's neighbors wouldn't eventually find means among today's ample global resources to utilize more of the Nile's waters for themselves, with or without Egypt's a.s.sent. It is a recurring pattern that civilizations born downstream in the fertile deltas and flooding river valleys saw political power eventually gravitate upstream toward those in the best tactical position to control the river's flow.

In the age of water scarcity, moreover, Egypt's traditional strategy seems shortsightedly disconnected from the new politics of water. It remains rooted in the historical time warp that it could extract an ever greater usable supply of the Nile through continued political dominance on the one hand, and by implementing grandiose engineering schemes for irrigation and new cities on the other. At the same time, its aversion to politically difficult domestic reforms promoting more-efficient use of existing water perpetuates wasteful water practices at a time of growing scarcity. Nile water continues to be given away to irrigation farmers at heavily subsidized prices, amounting to some $5 to $10 billion per year, encouraging profligate flood irrigation techniques that ruinously waterlog valuable cropland. ”Among the pervasive beliefs in Egyptian culture is that water, like air, is G.o.d-given and free,” explains Nile scholar Robert Collins. ”Any pricing system and controls on its use are totally unacceptable and almost blasphemous.”

Inexorably, Egypt's day of water reckoning is drawing nearer. Its dependence on foreign grain imports-providing up to two-fifths of Egyptians' daily bread-to make up for its freshwater deficit is growing. Simultaneously, the deleterious, long-term environmental impacts of the Aswan Dam are impinging with escalating force. With the river's fertilizing silt being entrapped and building up at the dam, Egypt's farmland is suffering the depletions common to intensively irrigated cropland everywhere. Soil salinization and waterlogging are eroding farm productivity throughout the delta and the Nile Valley. Without the natural silt buffer brought by the predammed river, Mediterranean seawater has intruded as far as 30 miles inland. The fertile delta, home to over 30 million Egyptians and comprising two-thirds of Egypt's agricultural area, is shrinking. The precipitous decline in annual water volume reaching the Mediterranean Sea from 32 to only 2 billion cubic meters following the Aswan Dam's erection is depriving the coastal and marshland fisheries of replenis.h.i.+ng nutrients and gradually destroying much of Egypt's once-thriving sardine and shrimp fisheries. The reliance on ma.s.sive amounts of chemical fertilizers is also exacting a heavy toll in both the Aswan hydroelectricity consumed in its production and from the pollution of the Nile and delta lagoons. Thanks to fertilizer discharge, water hyacinth blooms choke irrigation ca.n.a.ls, while infestations of the snail carrying schistosomiasis, the debilitating liver and intestinal disease, has been spreading.

In short, the full cost accounting is just coming due on Na.s.ser and Egypt's fateful mid-twentieth-century decision to submerge forever the Nile's unique ident.i.ty as world history's only self-sustaining major irrigation system behind the iconic, pyramid-like giant dam in the hot deserts at Aswan. At 75 million people and adding more than a million more each year, Egypt is dangerously outstripping the current productive limits of Aswan and the Nile. A second scissors blade, meanwhile, is closing on Egypt from the swelling demand for Nile water from the population boom going on throughout the Nile basin. In 2006 Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan had a combined population of 192 million; they are projected to add nearly 50 percent to reach 275 million by 2025. When all the Nile basin countries are counted, some half a billion people-overwhelmingly young, poor, and bred amid continuous violence-will be struggling to live off the waters of the Nile.

The prognosis darkened further when other related problems of global water scarcity are added to the picture: World food prices, which hit record highs in early 2008, are likely to climb higher in coming years from the 50 percent increase in world population, rising middle cla.s.s demand for animal protein in China and India, and even possibly from tapering supply if America continues its early rush to corn ethanol biofuels as a gasoline subst.i.tute. At the bottom of the food chain are the water indigent, who spend most of the family budget on food and simply have no margin to absorb the higher cost of their daily bread. Climate change forecasts, if they come to pa.s.s, add to the potential for cataclysm. Models predict that Nile flows might decline up to 25 percent from altered precipitation and evaporation patterns, while rising sea levels could inundate large tracts of Egyptian delta farmland.