Egypt and Water Security

    Hey, hey, hey! Welcome back to another blog post. I have been thinking a lot about water. Particularly-- water in the North African region since I have been writing a research paper on Egypt's interactions with water. Obviously, water is of huge importance for human survival, so what happens when a country doesn't have enough water or begins to lose water from other actors? Let's find out together as I briefly describe Egypt's situation.

Source

    So there are a few major factors that exist in Egypt that I think are important to reference when talking about water. Firstly, Egypt has one of the fastest-growing populations worldwide. With that, access to clean water sources has to keep up with this factor. A major challenge in achieving this goal can be majorly altered through actions by other states. Particularly, the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) has been a point of serious contention in Egypt. An important understanding to have is that Egypt's population is almost all centered on the banks of the Nile or in the Nile River Delta. This means that most of Egypt's population relies significantly on the flow of the Nile River for their water resources. With the erection of the GERD in Ethiopia, the flow of water to Egypt has indeed slown. There have even been open arguments and disagreements between Egypt and Ethiopia regarding the GERD (source). One thing that I think is important to pay attention to is the potential for this conflict to escalate tensions in the region.

Look at where Egypt's Population centers are. Can you guess where the Nile flows? Source

    Another area of interest in Egypt's water security is where Egypt receives its external water resources. Egypt has a government-subsidized food program that feeds most of the population. This program imports wheat from other states and turns it into bread to distribute to the citizens. For Egypt, most of their wheat imports came directly from Ukraine and Russia... yeah... So when the war in Ukraine broke out, and the exports of cereals nearly came to a halt, Egypt had to rapidly pivot to purchasing its grain supplies from somewhere else. Consequently, Egypt had to begin paying more for grain imports from other countries like India (source).

   

    Not only this but Egypt is actually known for being one of the top agricultural states in Africa. Almost 90% of Egypt's water usage goes to irrigation (since it's in a pretty hot and dry region of the world). With increases in water-demanding crops like cotton being grown more often, Egypt is only increasing its demand for water while the precious resource is continuing to dwindle in the country (source).

    Overall, as Egypt's water security continues to come into question as a result of various international factors and climatic changes, I do question both how and what the situation will look like in the next 5... 10... or 20 years. The important thing is for solutions to be explored for this problem which I (unfortunately) don't have time to discuss in this post. Let me know what you think and if you would be interested in learning more about this complex issue and potential solutions in future posts!