ABSTRACT
Egypt and Sudan are two key downstream countries in the Nile transboundary river basin. A significant part of the Nile Basin’s ecosystem and its watershed’s natural resources within both countries were under the control of the Ottoman Empire and its succeeding khedives and kings since Mohamed Ali’s invasion of Sudan in 1821. With the increased British influence in Egypt and Sudan in 1882 and 1897, respectively, coupled with colonial strategic interests in both countries – especially cotton cultivations and trade (Waterbury, 1979) – the Nile River flow was governed by the 1929 Agreement.1,2 Sudan eventually gained its independence in 1956 and signed the 1959 Nile Treaty3 between Colonel Abboud and Nasser, whereby Egypt and Sudan were granted full rights for the utilization of the Nile waters with annual shares of 55.5 and 18.5bcm (billion cubic metres), respectively. Today, the Nile River Basin is far from its hydropolitical shape of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries during the eras of the Ottomans, British colonialism and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (1899-1956). Sudan4 is now split into two countries: Sudan and South Sudan.5 Sudan’s quota based on the 1959 Nile Agreement also includes South Sudan’s share, with no clear rules on how this allocation will be divided between both countries6 – a fundamental question that has not been addressed yet in the complex hydropolitics of the Nile River Basin. Egypt and Ethiopia are also key countries likely to affect and be affected by transboundary water resources politics related to both Sudan and South Sudan. Egypt’s population grew by 46 per cent between 1994 and 2014 (Youssef et al., 2014), currently at 87 million citizens (CAPMAS, 2014a), forecasted to exceed 100 million by 2025, mostly concentrated within the narrow Nile Valley constituting 6 per cent of the country’s total area dominated by the desert. While the available per capita water resources have reached an annual rate of 663 cubic metres/inhabitant in 2013, forecasted to reach 582 cubic metres in 2025 (CAPMAS, 2014b), Egypt’s annual share from the
Nile based on the 1959 Agreement has been facing political contestations by upstream countries led by Ethiopia – the source of the Blue Nile contributing 84 per cent of Egypt’s share of water resources. Ethiopia is also witnessing a demographic boom forecasted to reach 124 million by 2025 (UNDESA, 2012) with serious socio-economic and poverty challenges. Both Sudan and Ethiopia are undertaking several mega infrastructure developments accompanied by increased unilateral investments in dams, water resources projects and large-scale irrigation (LSI) schemes with the active participation of the private sector. The Nile River Basin is indeed witnessing ‘the end of its status quo’ (Verhoeven, 2013). Perhaps the tripartite agreement signed between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan in Khartoum on 24 March 2015 indicates a new chapter of cooperation in the Nile. Yet, it is just a beginning that requires a myriad of institutional arrangements and political will to address the various social, economic and environmental dynamics and complexities of the basin and its natural resources. For instance, since the signing of the initial agreement, a series of meetings took place between the Tripartite Committee of Experts of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) consisting of 12 members from the three Blue Nile countries. Up until July 2015, seven meetings have been held with no clear agreement on setting a date to sign a contract with the French and Dutch consulting companies in charge of conducting detailed studies about the hydrological and environmental impacts of the dam (as widely published by several official sources in local newspapers and media outlets). Even during the seventh meeting held on 22 July in Khartoum, negotiations have been reported to face serious bottlenecks whereby the committee has also failed to reach the basic standards that will be put forward to the consulting companies in charge of conducting the assessments, expected to last for 11 months. But even if these issues are resolved, a new dimension is arising in the Eastern (Blue) Nile Basin concerning longstanding and complex hydropolitics beyond the upstream-downstream contestations of historical water shares and the state-centric conflict and cooperation narratives in the transboundary water resources literature. Large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) and water-related investments (financing in infrastructure, dams, reservoirs, canals, irrigation and agriculture technologies) are witnessing a different pattern in Africa and the Nile Basin, shaped by principles of the neo-liberal global economy and different political economy drivers. Financial investments in agriculture targeting LSLAs are primarily driven by available fertile land and water resources, especially in countries with similar resource endowments such as Sudan. Such practice can be best described as ‘the large scale acquisition of land in developing economically and politically weak countries through FDI by powerful, developed, economically robust, but water-stressed, nations’ (Sebastian and Warner, 2013: 2). Overall, ‘there is a perceived general pattern that investors do not seek lands that do not have water for production in the first place. So, land in itself is meaningless for their purpose without water’ (Mehta et al., 2012: 196). Despite sharp disagreements about the scholarly approaches to
define, calculate and report large-scale land deals (see Scoones et al., 2013), trends and patterns clearly highlight that African governments supply a large share of these acquisitions or ‘grabs’. Available evidence indicates that much of the announced land deals did not actually materialize; nevertheless, they point to an increasing trend for the use of land and water resources abroad. In light of the increased government support and promotion of agricultural investments, evidence suggests that many African countries are ‘motivated by potential revenues from water fees and the prospect of improved agricultural productivity, signing away water rights for decades to large investors’ (IIED, 2011: 1). Despite the fact that implementation on the ground is significantly less than the announced deals (Verhoeven, 2013; Woertz, 2013a), the documented trend of LSLAs by the different state and non-state actors is captured by the term ‘water grabs’ (Mehta et al., 2013). That is,
while control over water resources has been traditionally associated with state control and domination by national rulers (cf. Wittfogel 1957; Worster 1983) the term water grabbing draws attention to the involvement of new capitalist players and actors in water resources management and the rise of new political and economic power relations through diverse trajectories of neo-liberalism.
