travel

Egypt’s Western Desert

The 420-kilometre-long sandy road from Siwa to Bahariya Oasis in Egypt’s Western Desert would be devoid of human habitation if it wasn’t for the few military check-points scattered along the tortuous route. The smiley private, half-dressed in a tracksuit, asks for our papers and tells us that ‘Al Sahara jamil’ – the desert is beautiful. This optimistic outlook is shared by the Egyptian government, which is committed to making the desert green by implementing vast irrigation projects. For the last few years, this part of Egypt, occupying two thirds of the country’s surface (an area more than twice the size of the UK) has been subject to an unparalleled development scheme that is changing life in the desert: the New Valley project. Overpopulation in the Nile Valley has been a major concern for governments since the mid-fifties, when the first plans to develop a ‘New Valley’ parallel to the River Nile were first conceived. The figures are overwhelming: 1% of the country’s population occupy an area as big as France. The remaining 99% live crammed along the banks of the Nile, over 16 million of them in the huge urban conglomerate of Giza and Cairo. The New Valley is not only a land reclamation project, it is an enterprise in order to create 18 new cities and 100 new industries – apart from services, tourism and mining.

Siwa, 800 km from Cairo and on the edge of the Great Sand Sea in the Libyan Desert, is the most remote of the Western Desert oases.  ‘We’re not Egyptians’ – said Saied – we’re Siwans’. The relaxing atmosphere at the hot spring awakes nationalistic feelings in Saied. ‘It was different then’ – he continues, ‘It used to take seventeen hours on the box of a truck to get to Mersa Matrouh’ – merely 300 km away, ‘ but in 1986 everything changed. They built the road and the Egyptians came’. With the completion of the new road, air-conditioned buses make the journey in less than four hours and busloads of tourists arrive day and night during the high season. Hotels are being built and ‘safari’ companies promising the ‘real desert experience’ are sprouting on every corner of the central market square.  Siwa is a crossroads; its proximity to the Libyan border gave the oasis a strategic position on caravan routes. Today that strategic role is still present. Military intelligence is deployed in Siwa and a massive military compound sprawls on the outskirts of town. The military installations include a newly built stadium big enough to seat the whole population of the Oasis. The bright pink walls enclose a well-groomed grass football pitch with a complete irrigation system. The military in Siwa not only have an active interest in sports but also in local crafts. Every morning I see military minibuses taking young women to the new carpet factory. In the factory the military supervises 200 women in their late teens and early twenties working in a martial atmosphere of neatly laid out weaving frames. They have lunch on the premises and are escorted back to their homes in the late afternoon. The carpets made in the factory, which usually display ill-designed Egyptian motifs, sell in the European market for $150 per metre.

Water availability in a desert is bound to be a cause of concern. However, it is not the lack of water that troubles people in Siwa, but the excess of it. It seems to have always been like this. Back in 1928 Siwans had to abandon the ancient fortress of Shali permanently when heavy downpours almost washed away the whole village.  It rained continuously  for two days and 270 traditional houses were destroyed. Now Siwans do not want to build with traditional materials.  Siwa is one of the seven depressions in the Western Desert of Egypt. This means that they are closer to the aquifers that run along underground fissures from Equatorial Africa to the Mediterranean Sea. ‘The problem is that there is too much water’ –says Mahdi, Director of the Tourist Office, ‘ before, the water was shared by everyone on a fortnightly basis. Then the Egyptians came and starting digging wells’.  The environmental consequences of too much water are very straightforward: continuous flow of water decreases the aquifer’s levels and increases salinisation. There is no safe place for the run-off water to go: it ends up in the salt lakes around town, making already salty soil even saltier.

Water is the key player in Egypt’s Western Desert politics. I am on my way to Bahariya, across the barren desert, to find out more about water’s dual environmental and political role.

In Bahariya the government is financing enterprises with up to 25% of the total investment and promising tax relief for up to twenty years. The town has embarked on a building frenzy. On the outskirts of town along the main road to Cairo, just outside town, the 4-lane highway leads to a tourist complex still under construction. The nearly-finished hotel looks bizarrely similar to the military stadium in Siwa. A total of 65% of the New Valley population work in the agricultural sector. Egypt is among the world’s first producers of dates and palm tree by-products. The country is also among the top producers of olives. The largest cash returns from agriculture come from exports to Gulf countries and Europe. Bahariya boasts 268 mineral and sulphurous springs; several pumping stations feed water to the intricate network of canals that guarantee water supply to even the farthest field in the palm grove.

The New Valley schemes are also evident in Farafra Oasis, 180 km south of Bahariya. To put it in a nutshell Farafra is exploding. Half-built urban-style buildings, certainly unsuitable for the rigours of the desert environment, dot the entrance to Qasr Farafra, the largest of the twelve settlements in the oasis, giving an ambiguous impression of both development and decadence. Just before the main town a new government-run ‘tourist village’, watched by guards with old Enfield rifles, offers European standards at prices that are forcing other hotels out of business. The town has become just another site, time permitting, for tourists in their way to the White Desert, the main goal for most visitors to the oasis. The white chalk pillars and monoliths in the White Desert are guaranteed to satisfy even the most desert-hungry traveller. Yes, Farafra is booming. The government offers an attractive welcoming package for those willing to settle here: a house, land to cultivate, free water, free electricity for several years and a regular stock-up of staple foods. The new settlers will also find a school, a mosque and a hospital in every settlement. The new residents’ children will be able to play on the football pitches even at night, when the lighting system is switched on for the evening training sessions.

230 km from Farafra, people in Dakhla oasis are committed to make the best of New Valley developments. Dakhla has a population of 75000 living in fourteen settlements. Mut, the main town, is a direct result of New Valley policies. Every essential service is widely available.  Dakhla is also the breadbasket of the New Valley. By government decree every farm must cultivate a minimum range of crops, including rice, wheat, dates and olives. Among these crops rice is the most controversial of them all, due to the large amounts of water that it requires. Pick-up trucks that run eastwards and westwards from Mut, reaching every corner of the oasis, provide cheap and efficient transportation for locals.  The main threat for the villages in the oasis is the hostile environment they have to deal with. At merely 150km from the Libyan border and flanked by the escarpment that marks the end of the depression, some villages see how the encroaching sand dunes devour roads, fields, and electricity poles. Cultivation is the answer and it takes place everywhere that is flat enough for the water not to run off, even at the foot of sand dunes.

Kharga, 200 km east of Dakhla, is also blessed with an almost endless supply of water. Beyond Kharga, water scarcity regains its crucial dual role in development and politics. It is south of Kharga where the most controversial of all the New Valley schemes is already underway. A $8.8 billion irrigation project will eventually provide water taken from the Nile to almost 400.000 hectares of land reclamation. The project, to be realized by 2015-2017 but in production since 2002, is as daring as development projects go. The world’s largest pumping station, located near the Abu Simbel rock temples, is being built by an Anglo-American company in Toshka, on the shores of Lake Nasser. It will pump water from the Nile, targeting land reclamation in southern Egypt. The project will considerably increase the amount of cultivated land in the country, which at present is only 2.5%.. The project has attracted attention from the international community, particularly from the ten countries that depend on the Nile for water supplies. An agreement signed by the ten states in 1959 will have to be redrafted if some of the signatory countries, like Ethiopia, start studying the possibility of diverting more of the Nile’s upstream water for its own use. Environmentalists agree that the project will inevitably have a disastrous environmental impact as well as posing serious problems due to population relocation.

Toshka seems to be a drastic but maybe necessary approach in a country where more than 90% of the landmass is barren desert. Whether the project fulfils its creator’s visionary predictions will only be known in the years to come. In the meantime, Egyptians fully believe in what 1920’s Egyptian explorer Ahmed Hassanein said about his homeland: the desert smiles, and there is no place worth living but the desert.