South Valley Development Project

Despite Egypt’s history of big solutions – the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dams - to floods and trade, and in those respects to development on the whole, its burgeoning population remains constrained to a tiny fraction of the country’s total land area. Seventy million Egyptians live on a scant four to five percent of the country’s land, mostly along the Nile River and Delta. It is a demographic anecdote that roughly corresponds to Egypt’s 3.4 million hectares of cultivated land, a scant 3 percent of the country’s total land area whose expansion, for the past two centuries, has been outstripped by Egypt’s population growth. And Egypt’s population continues to grow, making a crisis more and more palpable. Indeed, mitigating the country’s lack of arable land and heavy overcrowded cities is a high priority of President Hosni Mubarak’s government. The government’s solution is to implement more big solutions, all under the umbrella of the New Valley Project, in order to expand the country’s inhabitable land to 25 percent by 2017.

The South Valley Development Project, also called the Toshka project, is perhaps Egypt’s most widely publicized mega project within the New Valley scheme, and the focus of the Forum 2000 Foundation’s Exploring Water Patterns in the Middle East’s (EWaP) close-up on water activity in the Middle East region for 2007. In December, the EWaP team visited Egypt’s southern valley to see the controversial Toshka project firsthand. During the short trip EWaP visited the colossal Mubarak Pumping Station and the private farm of the Kingdom Agricultural Development Company (KADCO). If successful, the Toshka project will redraw Egypt’s demographic map in the south.

Summary