GERD as a Diversion: Megaprojects for the powerful, austerity for small farmers
During the years Ethiopia was filling the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam/GERD, Egyptian public discourse was dominated by fears of reduced Nile water flow. Over the last five years, this looming threat has dominated debates about Egypt’s water future. With attention fixed on the Horn of Africa, the Egyptian government launched large-scale land reclamation projects, seeking to channel Nile water into reclaiming vast stretches of desert.
Although these initiatives may appear promising, they raise pressing questions about water distribution priorities and their impact on food producers and national food security.
In a climate saturated with talk of water scarcity, water justice is pushed to the sidelines, while the crucial debate over how Egypt manages its water resources, and in whose interest, remains largely neglected.
Since Ethiopia began building the dam in 2011, Egypt has voiced persistent concerns that its 55.5 billion cubic meter annual share of the Nile could be reduced, undermining agriculture and threatening the national economy.
Negotiations between the two countries have repeatedly failed, escalating geopolitical tensions.
A narrative of fear
Despite these fears, evidence suggests that filling GERD has not yet impacted Egypt’s water supply.
Following the third filling of the dam, the head of the Irrigation Authority at the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation stated that water levels had not declined, attributing this stability to high seasonal floods in upstream regions.
Similarly, Diaaeddin El-Qousi, former adviser to the irrigation minister, confirmed that none of the four initial filling phases caused measurable reductions in Egypt’s water share. Hydrologist Abbas Sharaki noted that the fifth filling, completed last year, also had no negative effect.
The data published by the US Department of Agriculture’s G-REALM project support the credibility of this information as it provides a timeline of water level changes in some of the world’s largest lakes and reservoirs. The data shows that water levels in Lake Nasser from 2020 to 2024 remained at levels similar to or slightly higher than those recorded in the previous decade, contradicting claims of a crisis.
At the 2019 Cairo Water Week, Dutch hydrologist Eelco van Beek, introduced by Egypt’s Irrigation Ministry as research lead on GERD’s impact, presented a model predicting that Egypt would avoid water shortages unless dam-filling operations coincided with severe drought conditions.
Other academic research, such as the 2022 article by Adil Salhi and Sara Benabdelouahab in The peer-reviewed journal Sustainable Water Resources Management and the paper published in the prestigious journal Nature in 2020 by a group of experienced water researchers, reached the same conclusion.
In reality, filling phases coincided with above-average rainfall years. Sudan faced widespread flooding, while Egypt released millions of cubic meters through the Toshka Spillway to protect the Aswan High Dam once water levels reached their thresholds.
Despite these outcomes, the media machine, supported by some academic research, continued to produce a panic-inducing narrative about the impact of GERD. This sustained fear narrative shaped both public perception and policymaking, even as the threat receded.
A notable example was Al Jazeera’s “Choking the Nile” documentary, produced in collaboration with academic partners. It reinforced a sense of existential threat not only within Egypt but across the broader Arab public. Both the state and the opposition drew on this framing in order to mobilize international pressure on Ethiopia, and censure the government’s management of Nile negotiations.
Beneath this public debate over GERD lies a more complex domestic story: To what extent has this narrative of external threat served as political cover for internal policy shifts involving large-scale water reallocation?
The farmer’s water for the pasha’s land?
In the past decade, Egypt significantly expanded its desert agriculture through state-led initiatives like the 1.5 Million Feddan Project, Toshka and East Oweinat, and the New Delta project, complete with an artificial river. Each has been presented as a transformative tool of agricultural development.
However, their implementation raises difficult questions about how water is allocated and redirected to these projects, as well as their broader impact on the future of agriculture.
Toshka project is located in the Western Desert, about 225 kms south of Aswan. It was part of the great dream of every Egyptian president to turn the desert into a green oasis. Despite its grand ambitions, the project that started in 1997 faced numerous challenges that prevented completion by the planned target of 2017, with an estimated cost of around $70 billion.
The main goal was to create a new agricultural delta in the south of the Western Desert and to increase farmland by 1 million feddans (4,200 kms2), in addition to building new industrial and urban communities providing 45,000 jobs annually, with hopes that the area would eventually host between 4 and 6 million people.
The project was allocated 5 billion cubic meters of Nile water, taken from Lake Nasser by a main pumping station requiring 250 megawatts, pumping into the Sheikh Zayed Canal which extends 47.45 kms with a 30-meter-wide bed and includes a regulator for water levels and a spillway for excess.
With water reaching the Sheikh Zayed Canal in 2003, Gulf investments began to flow into the area. Saudi firms Kingdom Holding and Al Rajhi and the Emirati company Al Dahra acquired most of the project’s land, each receiving 100,000 feddans, while the Egyptian state-owned South Valley Development Company received 62,000, for a total 362,000 of the targeted 450,000 feddans.
The four branch canals and the full land distribution were not completed when the January 2011 revolution erupted. During the two years of uprisings, disputes over the land granted to Kingdom Holding, owned by Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, intensified. Under public and media pressure, the company gave up 75,000 feddans of undeveloped land, keeping only 25,000.
In 2014, state interest in Toshka was revived, with the target area expanded to 1 million feddans and incorporated in the presidential plan to reclaim 4 million feddans. Support was redirected to the project and it was rebranded “Toshka Al-Kheir.” In 2017, the National Service Projects Organization bought the remaining lands from Kingdom Holding.
In July 2019, presidential decree No. 337 withdrew 219,000 feddans from the General Authority for Rehabilitation Projects and Agricultural Development and reallocated 102,000 feddans back to the authority and 275,000 to the military’s National Service Projects Organization for reclamation and cultivation.
According to a report published then deleted by Al Mal newspaper, large areas were taken back from major companies operating in Toshka. South Valley was left with 44,200 feddans, Al Rajhi with 16,800, and Al Dahra with 37,500. Meanwhile, the New Egyptian Countryside Company received 108,000 feddans, and the Housing Ministry was allocated 10,000 to establish New Toshka city.
Eighteen months later, decree No. 621 of 2020 canceled the previous decision and allocated 930,000 feddans to the National Service Projects Organization in the Toshka Depression, half of it in Toshka and half in New Valley Governorate (Oweinat).
With the 2014 revival of Toshka project, its originally allocated area has doubled. In recent years, satellite images show a surge in cultivated land, including grains and alfalfa, as well as the world’s largest date palm plantation with 4 million trees, whose crop is marked for export through the National Company.
The growth in cultivated land at Toshka coincided with an official discourse emphasizing thirst and water shortages, without addressing questions of equitable distribution. Investors and the National Company enjoyed wide access to water and energy, while small farmers in the Delta and Nile Valley faced water austerity measures.
A New Delta at the expense of the old
Over 1,200 kms to the northeast, Egypt’s New Delta initiative involves a 114-km artificial river designed to bring Nile water, groundwater, and treated wastewater into desert lands. The project has already cost over $5 billion, according to a report by The Guardian.
Its two phases—Future of Egypt and the Dabaa Axis—have an estimated annual water allocation exceeding 3.5 billion cubic meters. The first phase aims to irrigate 2.2 million feddans (9,240 km2), almost 9% of Egypt’s total landmass.
A key component is a canal that diverts 10 million cubic meters of Nile water per day from the Rosetta branch, bypassing farms in the northern Delta to serve export-oriented agricultural zones.
The New Delta project also includes the largest agricultural wastewater treatment plant in the world. The facility, costing 20 billion pounds (approximately $400 million), processes 7.5 million cubic meters daily. It draws from agricultural runoff that small farmers traditionally reused for irrigation.
While the direct seizure of Nile water via a canal that feeds the artificial river is a direct subtraction from farmers’ water, the recycling of agricultural drainage water is a partial invisible seizure of water that they used to complete their quotas and irrigate their lands.
By rerouting both fresh and recycled water to new megaprojects, these policies diminish smallholders’ access to essential resources. A 2023 study titled “Squeezing Out the Nile Delta’s Drainage Water to Irrigate Egypt’s Desert Land” warned that such practices undermine food security by reducing water availability for existing farmland and increasing the vulnerability of rural communities.
Water equity in question
Egypt’s agricultural export sector has benefited greatly from these megaprojects. In 2023, fresh produce exports reached 7.4 million tons, generating an unprecedented $3.7 billion. Early 2024 figures show this trend continuing.
However, the billions of cubic meters of Nile water, rainwater, and treated sewage water that were pumped into these projects came at the expense of small farmers. Already contending with record inflation (63% in 2023), farmers have faced increasing difficulty accessing water for food crops. At the same time, narratives of national thirst and external threats continued to dominate public discussion.
This contradiction is particularly stark in the Nile Delta and Valley, where small and medium-sized farms face strict rationing and crops are dying of thirst. Water restrictions are rarely applied to large export-oriented ventures, especially those tied to military or elite stakeholders.
Despite consistent scientific and official reassurances that GERD has not reduced Egypt’s water supply, popular belief persists that it is to blame for local shortages. Farmers interviewed in Kafr El-Sheikh, Luxor, and elsewhere repeatedly cited the dam as the cause of water stress, a narrative that remains deeply embedded.
Under the guise of emergency, smallholder farmers have been systematically marginalized. Their ability to resist water diversion policies has been limited by a national discourse focused almost exclusively on GERD and the specter of drought.
Breaking away from the fear narrative around the dam and bringing back discussion on internal distribution and class-based inequalities in access to water is no longer a luxury. It is a social necessity to protect the most vulnerable and marginalized groups in society.
This article is published as part of the first year of the Mohamed Aboelgheit Fellowship for Journalists and Researchers program.