Water scarcity can create dangerous tensions between countries that depend on water supplies from outside their own boundaries, former United States Ambassador David Shinn told Laboratory employees at a talk last week.
"Avoiding a Water War in the Nile Basin” detailed the political, geographical, historical and scientific background of the 10 riparian countries that compose the Nile Basin. Of the 10 counties, Shinn focused on what he called the “key players,” Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia and Uganda, who are the most involved in claiming rights to water from the Nile.
Shinn, who served as U.S. ambassador to Ethiopia and Burkina Faso, has had extensive experience in Eastern African affairs. He currently is an adjunct professor in the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University, where he teaches African affairs and political analysis. Shinn periodically visits the Nile Basin region and frequently writes on conflict, terrorism, political stability, governance and Islamic extremism in East Africa.
According to Shinn, “water scarcity is the biggest threat to global food security,” especially in the riparian states. What makes the area particularly vulnerable to the demands for water is the tremendous population growth in spite of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. “At the current rate of growth, Ethiopia’s population will double by 2025, creating a larger demand for an already depleting water supply,” said Shinn. Egypt, Uganda, and Sudan also will experience heavy population growth in the next 15 years, he added.
Also alarming to the situation of these riparian states is the constant depletion of the supply of fresh water provided by the Nile River since 1980. Very little water now reaches the Mediterranean and as a result there is no fresh supply of sediments causing erosion in the Nile Delta region, Shinn said.
According to Shinn, Egypt is the most vulnerable country over the battle for water because it gets 95 percent of its water from outside of its borders, and most of that is from the Nile. Because there is very little rain in Egypt, it relies solely on water from the Nile for not only drinking water but to support agriculture, he said.
On the political game board, Shinn said tensions run high between Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan for several reasons. In 1959, Egypt and Sudan signed an agreement, which allocated three quarters of the water from the Nile to Egypt and a quarter to Sudan, excluding Ethiopia from the contract despite the fact that most of the water from the Nile originates from Ethiopia and creating “a virtual monopoly on Nile water,” said Shinn. Egypt also has large-scale irrigation projects in the works that would “[create] a huge demand on an already limited resource.”
How can a war be avoided in the Nile Basin area? “Riparian countries have taken steps to minimize the possibility of conflict,” said Shinn. “One such step is the creation of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), which promotes international cooperative discussion.”
The United States currently is not involved in the Nile Basin water issues, which Shinn personally believes is the result of strong U.S. relations with Egypt and the reluctance of the U.S. to take sides due to those relations. However, Shinn said he’d “like to see the U.S. take a more active role… I believe there is a way to do that without taking sides,” and believes that the "U.S. could be of great help.”
Shinn argued that the U.S. government could offer the Nile Basin countries science and technology assistance. “Los Alamos National Laboratory comes to mind here,” Shinn said.
