It is often said today that the world is running out of water. This is not true literally, of course. The quantity of water on Earth has remained the same for billions of years. Yet as human populations grow and water is put to new uses shortages will inevitably occur in many countries.
The present work by Dr. Mahemud Tekuya, a son of Ethiopia, studies this reality in the fraught context of the Blue Nile and other watercourses flowing from Ethiopia to Egypt. Most schoolchildren know something of Egypt, given its fascinating history and culture. This cannot be said of Ethiopia to the same extent, however, despite that country’s own highly developed society and, like Egypt, a history free of colonialism.
Egypt has been called the “gift of the Nile.” But while most lay people think of “the Nile” referred to in this aphorism as the so-called “White Nile,” which originates in the Lake Victoria basin and flows north to Egypt, more water by far, some 85 per cent, comes to Egypt from Ethiopia, via the Blue Nile, and also other rivers, notably the Atbara and the Sobat. It is thus understandable that Egypt would be alarmed by Ethiopia’s announcement in 2011 that it would begin constructing what came to be called the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (the gerd). This action precipitated a tectonic shift in relations among Nile Basin States, and in particular among Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan.
Given its importance to Nile riparian states, it is perhaps not surprising that a number of agreements have been concluded among those states. Ethiopia’s bold move to construct the gerd puts some of those agreements to the test. They will also be stress-tested by climate change, which will no doubt alter the flows of the Blue and White Niles more powerfully than any dam or other human instrumentality could.
For all of these reasons, and others that will emerge with the reading of the present volume, Tekuya’s work is of particular importance today. It should form part of the library of anyone interested in how states share fresh water, and indeed how relations between those states can be transformed by natural and artificial events.
Stephen C. McCaffrey
Sacramento, California
March 2023