The Nile River: the longest disputed fountain of life

Grand Ethiopia Renaissance Dam generates an international dispute on its waters

A traditional Arab proverb says about the Nile: “If you throw a lucky man into the Nile, he’ll come out with a fish in its mouth”. This, being just a fancy illustration of the river’s role on those living in its shores, still captures a pinch of truth. Since the first times of human history, the Nile has fed and provided water to millions of people. From the Egyptian to the Ethiopian Empire, going through the Nubian peoples, the Nile basin has seen the rise and fall of many civilisations. Its lands have been of rich and plenty for any society which settled itself around it, without creating constant quarrels for its waters. However, the industrial revolution and climate change has turned upside down the situation in a century.

Nowadays, 160 million people depend on the Nile water for living and in 2050 a billion people will live in the lands of its basin. In addition, the number of its riparian states is 11, every one of them having different needs and access to its waters. According to MIT researchers Messrs Siam and Eltahir, climate change will increase the number and severity of droughts and floods in the Nile, making the access to water more difficult. Also, the will for economic development in poor countries like Sudan or Ethiopia increases the pressure for using the river’s resource capacity. The building of a dam enables that state to generate great amounts of clean energy, improve its irrigation capacity -therefore its farming productivity- and to extend its clean water service. In consequence, an explosive combination is created in which water scarcity drives states to dispute the Nile’s water access.

The latest and most important issue for the last years has been the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), located at the Blue Nile 40 km before the Ethiopian-Sudanese border. The water collected at the Blue Nile basin in Ethiopian territory represents the 80% of the water that flows through the Nile River. Therefore, the GERD capacity of impact on the Nile’s water flow downstream is massive; moreover if we consider that the Egyptian dependency ratio on outside water resources is of a 97%. When the construction of the dam started in 2011, Egypt asked Ethiopia to cancel the project. The alleged reason behind this demand was the water access ratio for Egypt given at the international treaties of the colonial era from 1929 and 1959 (Nile Waters Agreements). Negotiated between Great Britain and Egypt, it gave the monopoly on water access to Egypt and Sudan, also giving Egypt the capacity to veto projects on the Nile River. Nevertheless, upstream Nile Basin states argue they aren’t bound to comply with these international treaties as they didn’t participate as actors on the negotiations. In addition, the rise of population in these upstream states pressures their governments to conduct projects of water collection in order to cover the increased demand.

In order to address diplomatically this dispute, in 1999 the riparian states signed the Nile Basin Initiative with the objective to administrate the so-called Nile River Basin. This international regime developed into the Cooperative Framework Agreement of 2010, which wasn’t signed by either Egypt or Sudan because it enabled upstream states to build dams on the Nile. Consensus was broken, and so tensions rose again when the mentioned GERD started to be built in 2011.

Negotiations between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia brought an agreement in 2015 by which the GERD would be built without conflict if its functioning was coordinated between the Egyptian an Ethiopian governments. The technical analysis was given to an international panel of experts with members of all the stakeholder states, which are supposed to present a report at the end of this year. Due to disagreements inside the consultant committee, the results aren’t sure to be published in time; and the last summer pooled water at the GERD in consequence of the flood season and the late construction station of the dam have again increased tensions between the involved countries. The uncertainty over Ethiopia’s unilateral filling of the water reservoir has possibly unchained the creation of an Egyptian military base in Eritrea and the funding of Ethiopian rebels.

The possibility of violent conflict in the near future will depend on the success of the current diplomatic solution. Its path is very narrow, as the capacity of the expert’s report to please all stakeholders is very little. Even then, an agreement on common governance over the dam’s functioning will have to go through a very tough negotiation –just as they have been until now-; in which consensus could be broken at any time. In any case, water management in the MENA region, and specifically in the Nile River Basin, will only be faced efficiently if tackled by states with international cooperation.