Many water experts, like public intellectuals and journalists for opposition newspapers, saw the New Valley Project primarily as an example of closed, nontransparent decision-making by the Mubarak regime. However, at the inception of the project, many of these critiques were aired privately or in the pages of opposition newspapers, as the regime embarked on a sus-tained propaganda campaign to market the project. This section explores the critiques that circulated when the project was announced in the late 1990s, when the regime’s rhetoric and expenditures on the New Valley Project took center stage in Egyptian political life.
Egyptian experts and intellectuals shared the conviction of state officials that some land reclamation was necessary. At the same time, however, experts called for limiting plans for land reclamation given scarce and increasingly polluted water resources. Upper-level bureaucrats within the Ministries of Irrigation and Agriculture privately expressed doubt in interviews with the author about the New Valley Project’s feasibility and costs. They stress their limited access to information and exclusion from policy-making. These doubts were often expressed by commenting on the political origins of the project versus more objective considerations of technical feasibility. As a top adviser to then minister of irrigation Mahmud Abu Zeid commented:
There was a strong political push for the Toshka (New Valley) Project. It was part of a policy decision taken by the Cabinet to develop the Western Desert, Sinai, and Upper Egypt. We have some technical studies, which are not public information, but even I don’t have that much information. If we were deciding on cost-benefit grounds, I would be reluctant to pursue it. If it’s just agricultural, the project will fail. If there are no investors, it will fail.58
Egyptian critics generally argued that scarce water and limited fi-nancial resources would be better spent on land reclamation or other economic activities near existing centers of transport and population. “It is true that the Nile Valley is overcrowded,” argued an outspoken former chairman of the parliamentary housing committee. “But why this project, and why now? Toshka will be a sponge, a sponge for investment funds that could have been used more productively elsewhere in the country.”59
During the project’s inception, environmental scientists were publicly circumspect in their criticisms about the possible environmental implica-tions of the project. In professional journals and in private discussions, however, several cited common concerns. The Ministry of Public Works and Water Resources initially estimated the amount of water required by the New Valley Project to be 5.5 billion cubic meters (BCM) annually, which constituted 9–10 percent of Egypt’s annual Nile water allocation.
Water and agriculture experts argued that this water should be used more productively elsewhere, particularly as drainage and salinity problems would undermine large-scale land reclamation efforts.60 They argued that using water to grow crops in the western desert offered few opportunities for reuse, unlike using water in the Delta, which is typically recycled as it flows through the system.61 More cost-effective approaches should focus on improving the old lands, they suggested, and include substantive efforts to provide rural sanitation, control industrial pollution, and implement further technical improvements to the irrigation system.62
The opposition press incorporated some of these expert critiques but emphasized the authoritarian nature of decision-making. They depicted the New Valley Project as yet another example of exclusionary and irratio-nal decision-making by an increasingly ossified circle of political insiders.
Opposition papers and journalists challenged the regime’s cost estimates for the project and argued that these projects were marred by high-level corruption, enriching contracting and construction firms close to the re-gime. The daily Al-Wafd newspaper embarked on a vociferous campaign attacking the project on the grounds that the government had presented no budgetary information to Parliament and had not released feasibil-ity, cost, and environmental impact studies to the public.63 Throughout 1998 and 1999 Al-Wafd escalated its criticism of the project as a slush fund for government contractors and their affiliates close to the regime. The government’s response was swift: it arrested an Al-Wafd editor and several journalists under a new and restrictive Press Law (#93).64
Leading Egyptian intellectuals and former officials also criticized the costs and uncertain returns associated with the New Valley Project
in interviews and specialized reports. One external estimate put the costs for water infrastructure at approximately LE5.5 billion, with total costs estimated between LE300 and 500 billion (US$90–150 billion).65 For 1999–2000, official figures show that planned investment in the New Valley Project accounted for 53 percent of the state’s total budget for the Minis-try of Agriculture, and 63 percent of the total planned expenditures of the Ministry of Agriculture.66
The Mubarak regime financed these costs through the state-owned National Investment Bank, a $100 million contribution from Sheikh Zayed, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, and using additional funds for land reclama-tion provided by Gulf-funded development institureclama-tions.67 Egyptian crit-ics argued that these funding sources did not meet the relatively rigorous standards used by the World Bank, and pointed to the numerous technical and feasibility studies produced by international consulting firms and aid agencies for other megaprojects, such as the Aswan High Dam and the Al-Salaam Canal. “The decision should be discussed openly, and a neutral committee should be formed to decide its economic feasibility,” observed a former prime minister who helped author the 1974 investment liberaliza-tion laws.68
The Mubarak regime widely publicized that the World Bank had undertaken an environmental impact assessment (EIA), and that it had contracted for its own EIA with CEDARE, the Center for Environment and Development in the Arab World.69 Neither impact assessment was publicly released, however, nor did the Egyptian environmental experts I inter-viewed succeed in obtaining copies. Similarly, domestic cost-benefit analy-ses were not available. A few were attempted by outside experts: one U.S.
academic calculated the infrastructure and investment costs per feddan of the New Valley Project at $4,337, while expected revenues over twenty-five years were projected at $2,589 per feddan.70 As the author noted, private firms would invest in such a scheme only if the government subsidized the full infrastructure costs.
In the absence of cost-benefit analyses or impact assessments, the New Valley Project was quickly linked in Egyptian political life with the reluc-tance of the Mubarak regime to democratize. The late public intellectual Tahsin Bashir christened the New Valley Project the “stealth project,” argu-ing that Mubarak and his appointees embarked on a colossal national proj-ect rather than acquiesce to a democratic transition.71 In 2008, a respected environmental scientist asked, “How, in Egypt, can the decision to do a 20–30 billion dollar project have been taken by only a few people? Only because high-ranking persons have tried to stay in power forever.”72