NEW SOURCE OF COTTON SUPPLY

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 3308, 31 March 1926, Page 6

NEW SOURCE OF COTTON SUPPLY

BRITAIN’S GREAT SUDAN ENTERPRISE. (By Warre B, Wells.) A new source of cotton supply, which must inevitably react on prrees throughout (ho world, come into being with the official opening of the real. Sennar (or Makwar) Dam on the Blu c Nile, in the Sudan. An arid and cmpjty district of tnc Sudan, some five million acres in area will be reclaimd by the dam from desert and transformed into one of the richest cotton-growing regions of the world. It is estimated that the 300.000 acres to be irrigated at once will produce 400,000,000 pounds or cotton a year, and that within a generation the output wili be worth £20,000,000 a year. The building of the dam, little as it may be to the liking of American cotton growers, is the kind of achievement performed by British hands, which rejoiced the heart of Theodore Roosevelt when he visited Egypt and the Sudan. The dam is on e of the greatest engineering fats in history; ijt rivals the. Pyramids and surpasses (he Assuan Dam, to date the largest on the Nile. The Sennar Dsm now ranks as the biggest in the world. It lias cost more than £10,000,000. Ift is two miles long, it necessitated the excavation of 17,000,000 cubic yards of earth and the erection of 15,000,000 cubic feat of masonry, and it holds back 140,000,000 gallons of water. In mid-channel it is ninety feet thick and 130 feet deep. It has 200 sluices and spillawys. In addition, a great irrigation! canal, altogether sixty-six miles long, has been constructed as part of the project. Four years’ continuous labor, ending with a race between the engineers and the flood, has gone to th c-com-pletion of the dam. Armies of native laborers, swarming over the land like ants, dug and delved under the supervision of white leaders. There was sheer digging by manual labor to reach rocky foundations, side by side with the use of mechanical conjtrivances which astonished th e native workers, who chant as they work as did their ancestors who built the pyramids.

The Nil e draws fe water from the lakes on the Equator in which us respective streams take their rise, ana they in turn are fed by tropical torrenjts' of rain. But these rains fall only at a certain, season, and the results is that at midsummer the Nile receives an enormous surplus of water which goes flooding down its bed toward Ithe sea. From very ancient times irrigation devices have existed in Egypt to take advantage of this sudden onrush of the precious Walter which is th c life of (the Nile Vaney, and it is to bring about its storage that the British have constructed* the various Nile dams. The Sennar Dam, situated 170 miles above- Khartoum and 2000 miles from Itlio Nile’s mouth, will do for the Gezireh plain, lying In the triangle between the Blue and the White Niles what th e Assuan Dam has done ror Egypt. Its main objet is the irrigation, primarily, of 300,000 acres of this rich black soil, where cotton will bo grown on 100,000 acres each year, in rotation with other crops. It is hoped ultimately to bring ten times as much ground into cotton bearing.

Political considerations limit tne present utilisation for irrigation purposes of \the Nile water stored up by the dam. A contract between the British and Egyptian Governments for th e allocation, of water supply makes 300,000 acres the maximum area in the Gezireh which may be irrigated immediately. This is du e to the fear of Egypt that the new barrage might divert water needed by Egyptian agriculture to th c cultivation 01 Sudanese cotton. In the ultimatum launched at the 'Egyptian Government following the assassination of the Sirdar a year ago England claimed the right to ignore this provision and to irrigate the Gezireh area 1 to an unlimited extenit, “as the need may arise”; but this claim subsequently was withdrawn on the understanding that an expert committee should propose a basis on which irrigation is possible without detriment to Egyptian interests. The question, however, remains in abeyance, due to th e death of the committee’s chairman before its report was signed. On behalf of Great Britain it is claimed (that there would be no danger to Egypt if the restriction were definitely removed. The situation will be eased by the resumption of work on the barrage on the White Nile above Khartoum, which will score an enormous volume of water, to be reserved exclusively ror the Egyptian summer crops. If the last and most ambitous part of tne programme approved by thd Nile Commission b 0 carried out, a barrage in the. heart of Africa at tne Norjthern extremity of Lake) Albert will create a reservoir of unparalleled dimensions sufficient to meet all possible needs of Egypt and to irrigate wide regions of the Sudan