Ethiopia lays foundation stone of new dam amid stalled GERD talks

Mohamed Nasr Allam, a former Egyptian minister of water resources, told Al-Monitor via phone, “The Agma-Shasha dam that Ethiopia is preparing to build is a small dam and does not affect Egypt’s share of the Blue Nile water.”

Allam criticized Ethiopia’s decision to start building the dam without notifying Egypt and Sudan, explaining that the 1997 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses states that any country seeking to construct a dam must notify in advance the co-riparian states and even obtain their approval before taking any steps on the ground.

Commenting on the timing of the project, Allam said that announcing this project in light of the faltering GERD negotiations “is nothing but bad propaganda to raise questions and confusion among the Egyptian public opinion about the impact of the new dam on Egypt’s water share.”

The two downstream countries — Sudan and Egypt — have been striving, since the construction of the GERD in 2011, to reach a legally binding agreement with Ethiopia — an upstream country — through negotiations on the filling and operating of the dam, within the framework of the Declaration of Principles between the three parties signed on March 23, 2015, in Khartoum.

The agreement stipulated for the fair, equitable and appropriate use of the Nile’s water amid regional cooperation and integration. The GERD raises the concerns of Egypt and Sudan about affecting their water shares.

Egypt, which suffers from water scarcity, fears a decrease in its share in the Nile water amounting to some 55.5 billion cubic meters, as a result of operating the GERD, which Addis Ababa began building in 2011 on the Blue Nile in an area located on the Ethiopian-Sudanese border, at an estimated cost of about $4.6 billion, with a maximum capacity of 74 billion cubic meters.

The dam might also affect agriculture in Sudan by retaining silt and decreasing the water level that will impact fisheries.

Ethiopia, for its part, assures that the dam is necessary for the country’s development as it provides Addis Ababa and neighboring countries with large quantities of electricity.

“The Ethiopian Agma-Shasha dam has a limited capacity. It is true that it is being built on a tributary of the Blue Nile, but it will not affect Egypt’s water share,” Abbas Sharaqi, a professor of biology and water resources at Cairo University, told Al-Monitor.

He said that these small dams, however, do not require prior notice to the Blue Nile countries, as they are considered a local project, serving irrigation and not electricity generation, unlike massive dams that withhold large quantities of water such as the GERD.

Sharaqi ruled out that there is any correlation between the timing of Addis Ababa’s announcement and the faltering talks on the GERD, stressing that the matter is not a cause for concern in any way.