Sahara resists attempt to make desert bloom

Press, 30 August 1977, Page 20

Sahara resists attempt to make desert bloom

A United Nations conference on the spread of deserts is meeting this week in Nairobi, Kenya. lAN GUEST, in Cairo, describes an Egyptian attempt to turn back the tide of sand.

On the map of Egypt, the Western Desert stretches out from the green strip which represents the Nile — a formidable, uniform brown except for a crescent of oases. In spite of the heat and desolation, these oases are the manifestation of a vast reservoir of water that could, if extracted, create hundreds of thousands of square miles of agricultural land. Technically more accessible. and if anything more of a national priority, than North Sea oil is for Britain, the water remains tantalisingly untappahle because of a lack of investment. The water lies in a bed of sandstone and its most likely origin is the mountains of Chad. Preliminary boring, yhich began in 1959,

has combined with aerial surveys to suggest that the volume of water lies under an arbitrary area of 50.000 square miles and is constantly recharged at a rate of 130 million cubic metres a year. These estimates appeared to offer the Egyptian Government an opportunity to break out of the economic and psychological stranglehold imposed by the Nile Valley and Delta (where 98 per cent of all Egyptians live in only 3 per cent of the country's area). So the New Valley project was begun, with President Nasser’s blessings, in 1960. It covered the three southernmost oases of Kharga. Dhakla, and Farafra. The administrative centre

was the town of Kharga, which lies 170 miles from the Nile. In ancient times, Kharga was relatively prosperous. But in the Middle Ages it declined, until the British made an attempt to arrest its slumber and built a railway from the Nile Valley. Tarmac road reached Kharga in 1960, the year the railway was abandoned because its gauge was too narrow. Today, the town of Kharga has a population of 30,000, whom at least a

quarter are Government officials and their families. Since 1960, the New Valley project has sunk 160 wells, a third of them powered by diesel pumps, around Kharga, and 150 wells have been sunk in the neighbouring oases of Dhakla and Farafra respectively. The total amount of agricultural land created amounts to 45,000 feddans (18.000 acres). This land has been divided up into parcels of between two and four acres and

given to peasants who previously owned less than one tenth of an acre in the overpopulated areas of Assiut and Suharg in the Nile Valley. After 40 years of tenure, during which time it pays a tax of up to $BOO on each acre (depending on its productivity), the family takes ownership. Seventy per cent of the agricultural produce is sold at a fixed rate to the Government’s Agricultural Credit Bank (after the cost of seeds and fertiliser has been deducted). This food goes into the national kitty of subsidised food. In theory, it is an imaginative, perhaps even an exemplary scheme, and it deserves to be looked at closely by delegates to the

Nairobi Conference on Desertification. Not only is new farm land being created (as opposed to the purely passive aim of containing desert), but food is being produced foi the cities, farmers are receiving a guaranteed price for their produce, and landless peasants are being given land.

But the New Valley project remains very much on the defensive. For every acre which is reclaimed, at huge expense from the desert, another half an acre slips back. Of 15.000 acres reclaimed 6000 acres have been abandoned, and what agricultural land there is throughout the oases is under constant assault from the sand — and desertification.