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Egyptian civil society groups suggest an alternative water route for the West Delta Irrigation Project, that could serve poor farmers as well as rich investors, but the World Bank refuses to consider it.
In April 2009, three World Bank staff members, including the task team leader for the West Delta project, met with representatives from the Land Center for Human Rights and Habi Center for Environmental Rights in Cairo, to discuss the Egyptian civil society organizations’ (CSOs’) concerns regarding this project. The World Bank team insisted on the same mantra that the Bank typically uses, that, ‘by encouraging private sector investment the World Bank helps to create job opportunities and thus helps the poor!’
The project funded by the Bank and other donors, consists of the construction of an irrigation system that will divert water from the Nile to supply modern, export-oriented farms on reclaimed desert lands that have severely depleted groundwater sources. However, most of the crops produced in those farms are high water consumer crops that are not suitable for arid land according to scientists in the Egyptian Desert Research Center so one also has to question why water resources are being diverted to sustain crops that are not suitable for that environment in the first place. The design of the project is based on the assumption that Egypt would continue to get its historical share of water from the Nile- a highly questionable assumption considering the current negotiations of the Nile Basin Initiative to reach a new Nile treaty.
Another concerning premise that this project is based on, is that the modern export-oriented farms would not use up water resources at the expense of other agricultural lands along the Nile delta that produce most of the local market’s consumer crops, because these lands are actually not producing the level of agricultural products that they used to, and so do not require large amounts of water. In fact, the reason they are not that productive anymore is because of the urbanization process which has resulted in the depletion of much of the fertile land – an illegal process according to CSOs. One has to wonder if a better program wouldn’t be to encourage the preservation of fertile lands and direct urbanization to desert lands rather than the reverse.
While this project may achieve certain goals, two Egyptian CSOs are suggesting that there are better ways for achieving these goals and more. During a meeting with World Bank staff, representatives of the Land Center and Habi Center proposed that the Bank build water purification stations on Alrahawy drain, one of the most polluted drains on the Nile, and where the water level is at its highest. Water could then be diverted from this drain, which is closer to the new farms in the West Delta than the currently proposed location for the pipe network. Moreover, the treated water could then also be used by the farmers in the land along the old Delta.
In response to this proposal, the project’s task team leader insisted that the Egyptian government was the World Bank’s official and sole partner for this project, and that for any proposal to be considered it would have to be presented to them by the government. The two Egyptian CSOs had actually presented this alternative to the Egyptian Ministry of Irrigation at an earlier date but the Ministry did not give it serious consideration.
During the preparation phase of the project, the Bank organized consultations with affected communities as required by the Bank’s policy for these kinds of projects. People invited to those consultations were mainly representatives of the beneficiaries in the West Delta region and not of those farmers along the old Delta. Since this will be the first introduction of the public private partnership approach to the irrigation sector in Egypt, the Bank gave more importance to the discussion of this approach with the beneficiaries of the new land. The Bank considered only two types of alternatives during the preparation phase, and those were whether or not to implement this project; and whether to use an underground water conduit or an over ground one. These are not serious alternatives, but rather they indicate that the West Delta project was being given the green light without considering real alternatives.