The Role of the Agricultural Sector in the Face of Declining per Capita of Egypt's Share in the Nile Water
Abstract: ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
• Egyptian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Egyptian Association of Agricultural Economics, Vol.(23), No.(2), Cairo, Egypt, June 2013.
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Sustainable expansion of reclaimed areas to reach about 3.4 million feddan by 2030 and increase of cropped area from 15.4 million feddan in 2011 to 23.0 million feddan by 2030 are some of the main goals of the Egyptian Sustainable Agricultural Development Strategy towards 2030 (SADS).
Besides, the continuous decrease in per capita of Egypt's share in the Nile water with the faltering negotiations among Egypt and other Nile Basin countries on securing Egypt's share and the establishment of dams in the upstream countries will, in turn, affect the quantity of Egypt's share and the time spent till the Nile water reaches Egypt's boundaries. These challenges hinder horizontal and vertical expansion projects and affect the rates of food self-reliance and food security in Egypt.
Consequently, the objectives of this study are mainly concerned with examining the role of the agricultural sector in the face of declining per capita of Egypt's share in the Nile water and suggesting methods that would rationalize water use to meet the challenges facing Egypt's agricultural sector. To reach its objectives, the study depended on descriptive analysis techniques and secondary data published by different authorities.
The results showed that the Nile River is the predominant source of fresh water in Egypt with its annual share of 55.5 BCM, representing about 78.3% of Egypt's total water resources. Existing groundwater abstraction reached about 6.3 BCM (8.9%) whereas, the reused agricultural drainage water drainage and treated wastewater is estimated about 7.8 BCM (11.0%). Apart from the Nile waters, Egypt has no effective rainfall except for a narrow strip along the northern coastal area with about 1.3 BCM (1.8%).
However, the agricultural sector is the largest user and consumer of water in Egypt, with its share of about 60.9 BCM, representing about 82.5% of Egypt's total water resources whereas, the municipal sector consumes about 9.5 BCM (12.9%) and the industrial sector consumes about 1.2 BCM (1.6%). Evaporation losses from the Nile River and the canals reached about 2.2 BCM (3.0%). These results indicated that water shortage of about 1.15 BCM occurred in 2010/201.
The main findings revealed that according to the water stress indicator, Egypt, with its average annual water resources per capita of about 890 CM during the period (1996-2011), is one of the countries facing water scarcity.
Nevertheless, this average had a decreasing trend by about19.54 CM/year, representing 2% of the per capita of Egypt's share in the Nile water during that period. This decreasing trend was statistically significant at the 0.01 level. The study drew attention to external and internal justifications to rationalize water consumption in Egypt.
The key external justifications include the stability of Egypt's share of Nile water and the talk about its reduction (e.g. low rates of rainfall on Nile basin upstream countries, the expected decline in Nile water flow as a result climate change, agricultural foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Nile Basin countries, and the majority of the upstream Nile Basin countries dropped below the global water poverty line). The major internal justifications to rationalize water consumption are the increasing demand on water resources and the low water use efficiency (WUE).
The study suggested several methods that would rationalize water use e.g. improvising irrigation, using modern irrigation systems (sprinkler and drip irrigation), using protected agriculture, using land conservation technologies, developing and using short-age varieties for water-consuming crops (rice and sugarcane), activation of agricultural legislation for rice cultivation offenses, modify agricultural practices, and re-considering the current cropping pattern.
On the other hand, The study recommended continuing negotiations on the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) with the Nile Basin countries, increasing formal and informal co-operation among Egypt and other Nile Basin countries, encouraging Egyptian companies towards agricultural FDI in the Nile Basin countries, taking serious steps towards resorting to the International Arbitration to explain Egypt's historical acquired rights in the Nile waters to the international community and donor institutions, reducing water irrigation losses through improving on-farm irrigation and using modern irrigation systems, rationalizing water irrigation through using developing and using short-age varieties for water-consuming crops, and re-considering the current cropping pattern.
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URL
Publication year 2013
Availability location مكتبة معهد بحوث الاقتصاد الزراعي-7 ش نادى الصيد - مبنى الهيئات والشركات - الدقي- الجيزة (الدور الرابع
Availability number
Organization Name
City القاهرة
serial title المجلة المصرية للاقتصاد الزراعي
Author(s) from ARC
Publication Type Journal
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