Most Egyptians live in the increasingly urbanized Nile Delta and Nile Val-ley. The Egyptian government maintains that moving people to the desert is essential to deal with urban encroachment on old agricultural lands and high rates of population growth.9 From 1975 to 2005, Egypt’s population expanded from 39.599 million to 77.154 million.10 As a result, by the 1990s, per capita arable land was among the lowest in the world, at 0.12 feddan (slightly over 1 acre) per person.11
The New Valley Project was the most ambitious but not the only large land reclamation project initiated by the Mubarak regime during the late 1990s. Together, projects in the northern Sinai and southwestern desert aimed to increase Egypt’s total arable land by 3.4 million feddans by 2017.12 Maps produced for the Cabinet of Ministers report “Egypt’s Development Strategy until 2017” graphically portray these future irrigated areas as new bands of green space cutting dramatically across Egypt’s desert peripheries (See map 6.1).
Several scholars have critiqued the substance and representation of this demographic-environmental imaginaire. Timothy Mitchell showed how aid agencies and the Egyptian government reproduce a pervasive visual imagery in reports and documents, in which a burgeoning population is confined within a narrow habitable river valley amid vast deserts.13 Ray Bush captured the essence of this imaginary when he noted that “Egyptian environmental policy discussion focuses almost exclusively on the relationship between population pressure, scarce water resources and limited cultivable land.14 These and other critics have suggested that focusing on an imminent ecological-demographic crisis allows the government to avoid grappling with the more difficult social problems of rural poverty and unequal landholdings.15
A parallel crisis narrative has also been circulating in Egypt. This nar-rative focuses on the scarcity and degradation of Egypt’s water resources, highlighting the country’s dependence on the Nile River. Egyptian water experts have long argued that Egypt’s 55 billion cubic meters quota of Nile water is fully utilized and that with population growth, Egypt will soon face significant water scarcity. Not surprisingly, in light of these assertions, Egypt has adamantly refused to renegotiate the 1959 treaty that reaffirmed the British colonial allocation of the full flow of the Nile River to Egypt and Sudan. Upstream states have declared their intention to reallocate Nile flow, with or without Egypt’s participation, producing acrimonious exchanges in the World Bank–sponsored fora of the Nile Basin Initiative.16
In arid lands, water is the principal constraint on the expansion of irrigated land. Yet there has been little serious public debate and few policy shifts regarding limiting water for agricultural use in Egypt. As Tony Allen has argued, the global trade in food, especially cereals, allowed Middle Eastern political economies to quietly address water deficits through food imports.17 Importing virtual water perpetuated a myth in which “econo-mies have enjoyed stability and expansions because of efforts by farmers and managers to manage an adequate supply.”18 The perception that sup-ply was manageable, and that existing uses could be made more efficient Map 6.1. Land reclamation in Egypt’s master plan until 2017. “Agriculture until the year 2017,” in Egypt and the Twenty-First Century (Cairo: Arab Republic of Egypt, Cabinet of Ministers, 1997), map no. 2, p. 191 (in Arabic).
through water conservation and new technologies, allowed policymakers to remain complacent about, and wedded to, large-scale land reclamation.
Perceptions of adequate water supply were reinforced during the late 1990s, when the New Valley Project was announced. Historically high lev-els of rain in the Ethiopian highlands (which accounts for 85 percent of the Nile’s flow) during the prior decade resulted in high flows behind the Aswan High Dam. For the first time, in 1997, the government preemptively released water through the dam’s spillway, creating temporary lakes in the southwestern desert and sparking domestic criticism about the “wasteful”
use of water. The perception of rising water behind the dam, like imported cereals, allowed Egypt’s political leadership to retain visions of large-scale land reclamation. Thus, the regime and commercial farmers alike have, in practice, been relatively complacent in the face of mounting water scarcity in subsequent years.
Land reclamation has proceeded steadily in Egypt since the 1950s. This reclamation has taken place, however, not primarily in large-scale, state-sponsored projects in the desert peripheries. Instead, small agricultural producers and a mix of state and private commercial operations brought significant areas of land under cultivation in areas bordering the existing Nile Delta and Valley, close to population centers and transport networks.19 The total amount of agricultural land as a result of these reclamation activi-ties increased from approximately six million acres in 1972 to eight million acres in 2003.20 This increase occurred despite the rapid urbanization of the
“old” arable lands of the Nile Delta, which constitute 60–65 percent of the total agricultural land in Egypt.21 One recent study put urban encroachment on “old” Delta agricultural lands at a net loss of 28.43 percent (32,236 acres) between 1972 and 2003, with an annual loss of 1,040 acres.22 Predictably, urban expansion has been most rapid around Cairo and its satellite cities.
Not surprisingly, newly reclaimed lands are not as productive as the old lands of the Delta; these show less biomass in remote sensing analysis than old Delta land or land under reclamation for decades.23 The expansion of irrigated agriculture to new lands has accelerated the depletion, saliniza-tion, and pollution of groundwater resources, requiring donor and state interventions to deal with deteriorating groundwater quality and aquifer subsidence.24 Both “new” and “old” reclaimed lands thus require ongoing government, multilateral, and private investment to ensure that cultivation remains viable.25 The principal issue for Egyptian officials, peasants, and donors is thus not whether the state should support land reclamation, but in what ways, where, and for whose benefit.