Ethiopia starts filling disputed River Nile dam | DW News

this is the ethiopian grand renaissance dam or gert for short erected on the river nile's main tributary the blue nile it took almost a decade to build and it's meant to be part of ethiopia's transformation roughly 65 of the country is not connected to the power grid energy from the dam could more than double ethiopia's current output fulfilling its needs and making it an exporter but the dam is also highly controversial due to its location the nile's main source the blue nile starts in ethiopia at lake tana the river flows towards sudan and joins the river's other tributary at sudan's capital khartoum before heading downstream to egypt gerd is being built here on the border with sudan near the blue nile source the dam will catch water in its massive reservoir whose surface area is larger than that of greater london this will inevitably have an effect on how much water flows to downstream countries egypt and sudan egypt is home to almost 100 million people who depend on the nile for 90 of their fresh water supply some fear that ethiopia will leave too much water in its reservoirs during periods of drought endangering the flow downstream that could leave egypt's farmers unable to irrigate their lands causing major food losses and all this as the effects of a warming climate have already strained egyptian agriculture the effects for sudan seem mixed one fear here is that the gerd could jeopardize the operations of sudan's own dams on the nile however sedan also sees an opportunity to get cheap energy from ethiopia thanks to gerd and it could regulate water flows that have sometimes caused flooding these competing interests are among the reasons why negotiations over the dam's operations have been difficult no comprehensive final deal has been reached but even with an agreement cooperation between egypt ethiopia and sudan will be needed for the years to come there are more projects planned along the nile and the effects of climate change and growing populations mean water could be an increasingly scarce resource for more let's bring in aya ibrahim who filed that report and has reported from the region quite a bit for a dw news ayah welcome so clearly negotiations are difficult but what are the main sticking points i mean right now the main sticking point is uh egypt and sudan's attachment to whatever agreement comes out of these negotiations being a legally binding agreement this has been very important for these two parties throughout the negotiations but now ethiopia is hinting that maybe this they can discuss these these matters but the legally but the legal binding aspect of the of the deal is suddenly now coming into question and this is very important for egypt and sudan uh not because of the initial stages of the filling which have which has already been completed but their big thing is what happens if there's a drought what if there's a prolonged period of drought and they want ethiopia to be legally attached to releasing a certain amount of water from their massive reservoir to offset the drought periods but there's also competing economic interest we're talking about three countries and they have their own individual interests is that all there is to it or is there something else also afoot i tend to think that the competing economic interests are perhaps the easiest part to understand of this conflict the more difficult part to understand and the less tangible is that this is also about history and this is about identity this is about who gets to set the rules about a very very important asset for all aspects of life i mean you have ethiopia which sees egypt egypt's claims to the nile as colonial heritage that they completely reject and you have egypt who thinks who's you know the nile is interwoven in egyptian identity and in egyptian history and it's hard to think of egypt without denial at least to the egyptians there has been talk of war is there any risk of armed conflict over this disagreement it's possible but unlikely and it's possible only because leaders of both egypt and ethiopia have not ruled it out completely but if you look at the current situation the fact that egypt's parliament just last week gave essentially a green light for egypt to intervene in libya egypt now militarily at least has too much on its plate and if they were to strike the dam it can always be rebuilt again and there's also the geopolitical aspect which is that sudan is right in the middle so unlikely but possible it remains to be seen you never know hi ibrahim thank you so much for coming in for more let's bring in william davison he's a senior analyst for ethiopia with the international crisis group he joins us now from addis ababa uh mr davidson what is the main sticking point at the moment um well there isn't one sticking point but there is a sort of whole category of legal issues um which are proving um hard to overcome and they're also related to outstanding disagreements over some hydrological issues and to give an idea of what i'm referring to there um as mentioned in your report um there is the debate over how to manage droughts how the renaissance dam will operate in the event of a drought so how much water will be released from the gerd's reservoir during certain categories of drought and then there are a number of legal disputes notably on the issue of arbitration so if there is a future dispute will there be third-party arbitration to resolve it ethiopia rejects that that egypt and sudan insist on it and then a major issue which really connects to all the others is if there are any future developments upstream of the gerd on the blue nile how will that be factored into any gerd agreement um because it will impact the amount of water flowing into the gerd and therefore there might be a need to adjust the agreement but the parties simply do not agree about how to factor that in to the agreement at the moment considering uh these sticking points which country needs to be more flexible out of the three i mean considering that this dam has been built on the ethiopian side of the border is it ethiopia that needs to be a little more flexible i think everyone needs to be a little bit more flexible here just make whatever concessions they find acceptable and will help to get to an agreement there's some quite tricky disputes this issue of arbitration that i mentioned that's a kind of binary disagreement so it looks like maybe by improving a third party mediation process and other trust building mechanisms maybe the focus can be taken off that dispute over arbitration with regards to drought management ethiopia has said that it wants sudan and egypt to also use their reservoirs to combat drought so you know our sudan and egypt prepared to do that can ethiopia come up some proposals for how that will work and maybe also egypt could soften some of its demands about the amount of water it wants ethiopia to release from the gerd reservoir during times of drought ultimately everyone has to play their part on this william davidson from the international crisis group thank you so much for breaking that down for us thank you

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Keywords: grand renaissance dam, grand renaissance dam ethiopia, grand renaissance dam 2019, nile river, nile river dispute, nile river conflict, water dispute, water conflict, egypt ethiopia, egypt ethiopia water, egypt ethiopia conflict, egypt ethiopia dispute, nile water, nile water conflict, nile conflict, nile dispute, water resources, africa water, ethiopia, egypt, grand ethiopian renaissance dam, ethiopian dam, nile river dam, nile dam dispute, gerd, egypt sudan ethiopia

Id: yYaYCklXCIk

Length: 7min 51sec (471 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020