၊မြစ်ဆုံရေကာတာအကြောင်း အမှားနဲ့အမှန် – – Myitsone Myths and Truths – LVI

M. A. ABU-ZEID & F. Z. EL-SHIBINI

Fum Ismailiya Canal Shoubra El-Khima, Box 74, Cairo, Egypt

ABSTRACT History tells us that Egypt’s fertile land is the gift of the Nile. However,for the ® rst time in history, full control of the Nile water was achieved in 1970 after the construction of the High Aswan Dam (HAD). The HAD is a multipurpose project for sustainable irrigation development,hydropower,navigation improvementetc. Different schools of thought appeared before and after the HAD projectÐ optimistic,pessimistic and neutral. However, the anticipated bene® ts and side-effects have provided clear and obvious facts in response to the different ideas after more than 25 years of operation. The HAD saved Egypt twice during the project’s life (a) from a dangerous ̄ flood series which occurred in the late 1970s,and (b) from severe droughtsin the mid-1980s.As with other large projects, some side-effects have occurred, as anticipated, but the bene® ts far exceed these side-effects. There is no doubt that the HAD is the cornerstone for Egypt’s sustainable agricultural plans and many other developments.In this paper documented facts are given relevant to HAD water allocations for the sake of the welfare of Egypt’s future generations. These will include the realized true bene® ts and side-effects of the HAD.

lthough the decision taken was based on studies carried out by worldwide experts, in all ® elds and issues related to dam engineering, river and water management, social, economic and environmental aspects, there had been hot debates and controversies about the project from the outset.

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210 M. A. Abu-Zeid & F. Z. El-Shibini

Luckily the Egyptian leadership and decision makers, supported by solid justi® cation for the vitality and importance of the project for the welfare of the Egyptian people, decided to go ahead in constructing the project. Taking the achievements and impacts of the High Aswan Dam (HAD) over more than 30 years, it was proved that HAD had been the cornerstone in Egypt’s economic and social development and that criticisms and opposition to the project were groundless, and most of the con ̄ icts were inspired by political, ideological and emotional disputes, and unbalanced or lack of objectivity and knowledge.

(၊သေချာမလေ့လာမသိဘဲနဲ့နိုင်ငံရေးအယူမတူညီလို့တချို့လူတွေကစိတ်လိုက်မာန်ပါအာလူးပေးအခြေအတင်အတိုက်အခံလုပ်နေတာပါ)

ICOLD၊နိုင်ငံတကာရေကာတာအသင်းကြီးက၊ရေကာတာကိုစီစစ်ထောက်ခံခဲ့တယ်၊ Excellentအလွန်ကောင်းဆိုပြီးလုံးဝထောက်ခံမှတ်ချက်ပြုခဲ့တယ်၊
(ဒိအပြင်အမေရိကန်နဲ့ရုရှားကထောက်ခံခဲ့တယ်၊အီဂျစ်သမတနာဆာNasserကအမေရိကန်ကိုဆဲလွန်းလို့အမေရိကန်ကမလုပ်ပေးဘဲ၊
ရုရှားကဝင်လုပ်ပေးခဲ့တယ်၊)

These ® ndings were evident in the outcome of the Executive Meeting of the International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD), held in Cairo 1993, where the environmental, social and economic aspects of the HAD were thoroughly discussed by worldwide experts, who gave support to the HAD as a vital achievement in a documented report and certi® cate of excellency.

The main aims of the construction of the High Aswan Dam can be summa- rized as follows:

 Nile ၊နိုင်မြစ်ကိုအပြည့်အဝထိန်းမယ်

full control of the Nile ̄ ow at Aswan in the far south of Egypt;

ရေလိုအပ်ချက်အမျိုးမျိုးကိုမျှတအောင်ဖြည့်တင်းမယ်

regulation of the discharge downstream of the dam to match the actual water needs for different requirements;

၊ရေဘေးနဲ့ရေရှားပါးခြောက်သွေ့မှုဒဏ်ကိုကာကွယ်မယ်

protection of the Nile Valley and Delta from high ̄ floods and drought hazards that could persist for several consecutive years;

သက်သာချောင်ချိပြီးသန့်စင်(သန့်ရှင်း)တဲ့ရေအားလျှပ်စစ်ကိုရယူမယ် 

generation of cheap and clean hydroelectric power;

(၊ဆည်မြောင်းလုပ်ပြီးရေပို့ခြင်းဖြင့်)လယ်ယာမြေကိုတိုးချဲ့မယ်၊

realization of horizontal land expansion by reclaiming new lands;

၊နှစ်သီးစာသုံးသီးစာရအောင်လုပ်မယ်

change in the system of basin irrigation (one crop per year), to perennial irrigation (two or more crops per year);

ဆန်စပါးနဲ့ကြံခင်းတွေကိုတိုးစိုက်နိုင်ခြင်းဖြင့်သွင်းယူရတဲ့ပမာဏတာကိုကန့်သတ်မယ်

expansion in rice and sugar-cane cultivation to limit imports;

ရေလမ်းသွားလာရေးလမ်းကြောင်းပိုကောင်းအောင်လုပ်နိုင်မယ်

improvement of navigation through the Nile and navigable canals; and realization of great ̄ exibility in agricultural planning, crop patterns and intensi® ed agriculture.

Increase in Irrigated Land Yield

The controlling of the River Nile ̄ ow by the HAD has secured a steady and continuous ̄ ow of water in adequate quantities that reaches all the arable land at the right time, particularly in summer when the natural ̄ ow of the Nile is much less than irrigation requirements.

This availability of water has secured ̄ exibility of agricultural planning, crop patterns and crop rotation. As a result, the cropping area has risen to about 14.0 million acres compared with about 9.3 million acres in 1952. The yield production per feddan (acre) has increased tremendously since construction of the HAD.

Egypt’s High Aswan Dam 211

212 M. A. Abu-Zeid & F. Z. El-Shibini Increase in Rice and Sugar-cane Areas

High Aswan Dam  ၊ရေကာတာဆည်လုပ်စဉ်ကဆန်စပါးစိုက်ခင်းကိုဧက ၂သိန်းမှဧက ရသိန်းထိတိုးဘို့ရည်မှန်းသော်လည်း၊ဒီရည်မှန်းချက်ကိုတောင်ကျော်ခဲ့ပြီးဆန်စပါးတန်ချိန်၄သန်းကိုထုတ်လုပ်နိုင်ခဲ့တယ်၊

To satisfy crop requirements for local consumption, and the limitation of imports, it was possible to increase the areas cultivated with rice and sugar-cane. With regard to rice, it was estimated during the planning phase of the HAD to increase the area from 200 000 acres to 700 000 acres. In fact, this acreage has been surpassed with production of about 4 million tons of rice.

၊ကြံစိုက်ခင်းတွတ်ကဧက ၉၂၀၀ဝ မှဧက ၂၇၅၀၀ဝ ထိတိုးလာပြီဧက ၇၀၀၀၀ဝ အထိမှာကန့်သတ်ရတော့မှာ

(ဦးထွန်းလွင်ကပါရဂူဘွဲ့ရဆိုလို့ဒီအကြောင်းကိုမလေ့လာမိလို့ဘဲလားမေးစရာရှိတယ်)

Land under sugar-cane production has also increased from 92 000 acres in 1952 to 275 000 acres. The sugar factories in Upper Egypt are now working at full capacity and have been newly extended. There is now a trend to expand sugar beet to replace sugar-cane gradually to save water consumption, and also to limit the area of rice to 700 000 acres.

Thus, our focus has been to assess appropriate impacts, especially environmental and social, about which there has been considerable global controversy ever since the construc- tion of the dam was initiated.

The importance of the dam to Egypt’s economic survival was clearly demonstrated, at least qualitatively, during the 1980s. It is not too difficult to hypothesise what would have happened to the Egyptian economy and socio-political conditions if the dam had not been there to protect the country from, first, the potentially catastrophic impacts of a prolonged drought from 1979 to 1986, and immediately thereafter the abnormally high summer flood of 1988, which had devastating effects on Egypt’s upstream neigh- bour on the Nile Basin, Sudan. Even with the Aswan High Dam in place, Egypt had come perilously close to experiencing the catastrophic impacts of the drought by early 1988, due to a dangerously low water level in Lake Nasser.