Egypt Plans a New Valley to Rival the Nile

For the last 9,000 years, the Nile has been Egypt’s sole artery of life.

Agriculture and government were invented along its silt-nourished banks. The ancients built magnificent temples and awesome pyramids beside it. The annual cycle of its rise and fall ordered the lives of pharaoh and peasant alike.

A flood depth measured at 16 cubits (a cubit was the length of an arm from fingertips to elbow) on the “Nilometer” just south of Cairo meant a year of plenty; 12 cubits meant starvation and death. As the ancient Greek historian Herodotus put it: Egypt is the Nile, and the Nile is Egypt.

But now scientists and politicians are hoping to break that pattern.

They are planning to create a second river in Egypt’s Western Desert, a self-sustaining canal cutting through some of Earth’s harshest and most arid terrain that would link a series of remote oases and would eventually extend 500 miles.

The project would mean that, for the first time in their country’s millenniums-long history, Egyptians could settle in large numbers someplace other than along the banks of the Nile. That place is to be called the New Valley, and President Hosni Mubarak, an enthusiastic supporter, is planning to inaugurate its construction in January.

“There is no time to waste,” Mubarak declared last month. “Egypt should be reshaped and prepared for the coming century.”

A total of 62 million Egyptians dwell on just 4% of the nation’s land. The rest is empty dunes and rocks used only by the few remaining desert tribes. Pro-government newspapers are calling the new river plan “Egypt’s national project for the 21st century,” destined to change the country’s map.

Mena Iskandar, chairman of the Aswan High Dam, whose construction in the 1960s created the world’s largest man-made reservoir, is a soft-spoken man who grows enthusiastic when he talks about the future.

“Now it is like what you see from the airplane in the sunlight--the green area looks like a green pencil line on the map of Egypt,” he said.

But in 10 or 20 years, there will be two pencil lines, or maybe a skein of green lines, he said: “We have very good quality of soil in most of the area of Egypt. All we need is water. We have to use our share of the Nile water concretely, effectively and without any losses.”

Still, not everyone agrees on the value of the plan.

“This project is nearly impossible,” charged prominent geologist Albahu Issawi, writing in the newspaper Al Ahram. “At best, it requires piles of money that Egypt does not have.”

The estimated cost is more than $2 billion.

Issawi asks: Why reclaim land in the middle of the desert when there is plenty of land to be reclaimed around the old Nile Valley, where it is easier to extend infrastructure?

With the population continuing to grow, he said, there will come a day “not very far away” when Egypt will have to choose between water for its tourist resorts and drinking water for its people.

Naysayers may wonder how a country that cannot keep its streets mended or enforce its building codes can accomplish such an ambitious undertaking. But this is the nation that built the pyramids. The New Valley project, advocates say, symbolizes an Egypt that is growing more confident in itself and its ability to control its destiny.

Forty years after it seized control of the Suez Canal, a quarter of a century after completing the Aswan High Dam and 17 years after it became the first Arab country to make peace with Israel, there is a feeling among Egyptians that their country is ready to conquer new frontiers.

The government is claiming victory over its home-grown Islamic extremists; economic statistics are improving; the private sector is expanding; the twin banes of the country--ignorance and poverty--are, if not defeated, arguably in retreat. As if to accentuate the good news, the Nile this year produced its highest flood since the Aswan High Dam was built, the water rising to nearly 590 feet, a few yards short of what the massive barrier can safely hold.

The High Dam itself engendered much controversy when it was constructed. Critics said a steadier flow would erode the Nile’s banks and ruin farmland in the Nile Delta if it was not renewed annually by the flood.

Today, experts agree that the effects of the 2 1/2-mile-wide barrier were not as severe as originally feared, while it gives Egypt a reliable year-round water supply and generates a third of the country’s electricity needs.

To protect this asset, engineers took an unprecedented precaution last month. They deliberately spilled off a portion of Lake Nasser into a depression in Egypt’s Western Desert, where they hope it will seep into the aquifer and feed desert wells.

In years past, a Nile flood of this year’s magnitude would have meant devastation and thousands of deaths downstream. But thanks to the High Dam, it now means luxury--allowing planners to indulge themselves in their seductive visions of a new green valley parallel to the Nile--a land of cash crops for export, modern irrigation methods, towns, factories and mines.

The working name is the New Valley Canal. The government is starting work on a tunnel and pumping station near the ancient temple site of Abu Simbel. The station, which will be one of the largest in the world, is to divert waters from the Nile 250 feet uphill at a rate of nearly 400 cubic yards a second to start the canal.

With Egypt’s burgeoning population and problems of congestion, pollution, urbanization and housing shortages, there is no question that its people need to spread out.

The country’s population has doubled since the 1950s and is expected to reach 80 million in the next 25 years. The goal is to reclaim vast areas of the desert, putting 20%-25% of Egypt’s land to use.

“In my opinion, it is a must,” said Abdel Rahman Shalaby, undersecretary for planning in the Ministry of Water Resources. “Otherwise, we will consume the land in urbanization, and then we will be looking for our food from abroad.”

Virtually all water in Egypt comes from the Nile, the 4,000-mile river whose two great tributaries, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, rise on the Ethiopian plateau and in the rainy upland of Burundi, respectively. Under international agreement with the other nine countries of the Nile basin, Egypt is entitled to take 72 billion cubic yards of Nile water annually--no more.

According to Shalaby, 13 billion cubic yards of the 72 billion could be saved or reused.

That would include recapturing agricultural drainage water before it flowed into the Mediterranean at the Nile Delta; exploiting treated sewage water to nourish nonedible crops; improving irrigation methods by lining or covering canals and using sprinklers and drip methods; and reducing the production of crops such as rice and sugar cane that require a great deal of water.

If these savings in water were made downstream, 4 billion to 5 billion cubic yards could easily be diverted to feed the New Valley Canal, which would also be augmented by water drawn from deep aquifers in the Western Desert, Shalaby said. The projected result: 1 million new acres of arable land.

It’s not just the new river where Egypt hopes to expand. Ambitious plans are afoot to reclaim parts of the Eastern Desert, between the Nile and the Red Sea, and the Sinai Peninsula, as well as to create resort areas all along the country’s Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts.

The New Valley project will begin 15 miles north of Abu Simbel with a tunnel to take water from Lake Nasser to the pumping station. From there, a canal would be dug in stages linking the existing oases of Baris, Kharga, Dakhla and Farafra, with the first 220-mile segment scheduled to be finished in 1999.

The diverted waters from the Nile would mix with underground springs to form a channel that, scientists believe, could be maintained perpetually.

The terrain for the canal runs about 200 miles west of the Nile’s current course. The area is mostly uninhabitable now, but it did have water more than 10,000 years ago.

Nazeih A. Younan, an irrigation specialist and engineer from Alexandria University who first articulated the proposal for the New Valley project more than a decade ago, said: “I consider that we have started a new era in exploiting and in saving water to expand our land.”