Money runs short for Nile canal project

Press, 7 June 1982, Page 12

Money runs short for Nile canal project

From “The Economist,” London

Sudan’s shortage of foreign exchange is slowing its attempt’ to-make the Nile flow faster. Millions of litres of water are lost through evaporation and seepage in swamps, called the Sudd, that cover a vast area in the south of the country, Egypt and Sudan, which desperately need every drop they can get, are trying to reduce wastage by digging a canal to divert a quarter of the White Nile that would otherwise stagnate in the Sudd.

The gigantic bucket-wheel excavator employed to do this job consumes more fuel than the regional capital of Juba to the south. Cash-short Sudan can no longer afford to supply it continuously with fuel, and has shut it down for as much as 10 days at a time. The French consortium responsible for the project, Compagnie de Constructions Internationales wants the Government in Khartoum, some 1000 kilometres away, to let it import fuel directly. Before the fuel shortage, mud posed the biggest problem for the canal's builders. While Sudan’s “black cotton’’ soil is ideal for lining a canal, it turns to concrete in the dry season. The excavator, brought in pieces from another job in Pakistan, has had to be rebuilt to bite better. The rainy season caused further problems. The construction team has prepared a series of drainage channels to try to solve them, but it will now take a financial miracle to complete the three-year-old project by 1985. So far, the two countries have spent SIOOM on less than a third of the canal’s 350-kilo- • metre length. . . When finished, the Jonglei Canal, as it is called, will increase the flow of the Nile downstream by 5 per cent a year. The population of the two

countries is rising by more than 2 per cent a year, and has already tested the limits' of available water supplies. Egypt and Sudan say they intend to build two more canals through the Sudd to add another 10 per: cent or so to the Nile’s yield by perhaps the year 2010. Local people might be helped more swiftly by other and less ambitious ways of - getting more from the river, such as re-using irrigation water which now drains away < under the fields. The benefits of building these canals will be felt hundreds of kilometres downstream, but there is dis-,

pute about their likely impact on.the people and the ecology of the Sudd. .About IM tribespeople. live in this most backward region of one of the world’s poorest countries. Optimists say that drying, out the swamp should cut down on disease, and the road running alongside the. . canal will, open up the south of Sudan. But it will also force a revolutionary change in the pace. of life of the herdsmen, who for centuries have fattened their cattle in line with the annual pulsation of the swamps.