The Ethiopians are building a massive dam, and Egypt is worried

Since Ethiopia announced plans nearly a decade ago to build a massive hydroelectric dam along the Blue Nile tributary, the Egyptian government has waited in dread at the prospects that its freshwater lifeline could slow by as much as 25%. “We don’t have any other resource in Egypt except the Nile water,” warned professor Nader Nour el-Din, a soil and water expert at Cairo University. “Even without the dam, we will have more shortages because with the increasing population the water available for irrigation is decreasing.” As it stands, Egypt is already below the United Nations’ water poverty threshold, with the dam endangering the livelihoods of half of the country’s population who work directly or indirectly in agriculture, said Nour el-Din, the soil and water expert. In 2013, Egypt’s then-president, Mohamed Morsi, warned that if his country’s Nile water “diminishes by one drop then our blood is the alternative,” though he insisted he wasn’t “calling for war.” “Between 2011 and 2017, Egyptian and Ethiopian leaders framed the GERD dispute in stark, hyper-nationalist terms and exchanged belligerent threats,” a report published last month by the International Crisis Group said. During a news conference in Cairo last year, Ahmed promised Egyptians, “I swear to God, we will never hurt you,” after Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi pressed him to swear in front of the Egyptian people that he wouldn’t harm the country’s Nile water share.