New Valley Project
Coordinates: 22 ° 29 ′ 41.3 " N , 28 ° 34 ′ 46.4" E
The New Valley Project (Arabic: al-Wadi al-Gedid , German: "New Valley") is a major irrigation project that began in 1997 in the Egyptian governorate of al-Wadi al-Jadid in the south-west of the country.
Objectives of the project
The project was announced in 1958 through a keynote speech by President Nasser to workers in Suez and began in 1960. The aim was to reduce the high population growth and the resulting settlement pressure in the Nile Valley , where almost the entire population (then approx. 30 million) lived on 3% of the state area (1 million km²) by developing new land in the western desert Achieve a higher level of food self-sufficiency . The project area initially comprised the five oases Siwa , Bahariya , Farafra , Dakhla and Khargaall west of the Nile between 22 ° 30 'N and 28 ° 30' N. The name “New Valley” goes back to a now refuted assumption that this is where the original valley of the Nile once was. A second Nile valley, according to the government's goal, should flourish in this chain of depressions and become a working and living space for thousands of landless Nile fellachs (farmers).
A total of 850,000 hectares of desert soil was to be cultivated by drilling modern deep wells . The agricultural area of Egypt amounts to approx. 2,855,000 ha, so that the implementation of the “New Valley Project” (NVP) would mean an increase of the cultivated area by 30%. Converted to the oases, the cultivation area would even be enlarged by a factor of 115.
Another aim of the project was the allocation of land to landless farmers from the Nile Valley. Up to a million people should find a second home in newly built settlements. The infrastructure required for this, such as roads, schools, hospitals, electricity and water supply, cultural and administrative facilities, was planned and implemented fairly quickly.
Problems
A crucial shortcoming of the NVP is the too rapid implementation, which followed a very short planning phase. In a very short time, investigations into water supplies, soil quality and cultivation strategies were carried out and without waiting for detailed results, work began. In the beginning, wells were drilled on designated areas at intervals of 3–5 km, to which an irrigation area of 200 ha was allocated. After the areas had been developed and put into operation, it turned out that the wells were nowhere near enough to water them. So they re-bored by compacting the well at 1 km intervals. But even that was sometimes not enough. The result was a mosaic of scattered areas with a size of 40–120 ha and in some cases even smaller.
Another reason for the patchwork of cultivated areas is that the water was not transported efficiently over such long distances (if the distance between the wells is 3–5 km, the distance to the outermost field is more than 1.5 km). Instead of building sealed concrete channels, the water usually flows in heaped sand channels up to 1.5 km. In extreme cases, this results in a seepage and evaporation loss of up to 85%, which is dominated by seepage, as evaporation only accounts for 1–2%. Another problem is the inadequate drainage and the associated salinization of the new fields, which, unlike the lowland areas, were mostly created in low-lying areas in basins with Pleistocene (Ice Age) lake deposits and are now particularly difficult to drain.
In the climate of the western desert, evaporation reaches up to two meters below the surface of the earth, so that effective drainage must be at least 2.50 m deep in order to prevent the capillary ascent of the water. The drainage of the water into marginal depressions also leads relatively quickly to the formation of a salty groundwater body at a shallow depth, which then also affects the new land.
literature
- Frank Bliss: Economic and social change in the "New Valley" of Egypt. About the effects of Egyptian regional development policy in the oases of the Western Desert. Bonn 1989.
- Frank Bliss: Conflicts Between the Traditional Usage of Water for Irrigation and Drinking Purposes and "Modern" Development, in: Der Tropenlandwirt 102, 59-73. Witzenhausen 2001.
See also
Individual evidence
- ↑ population counts (1882-2006) . Egypt State Information Service. Retrieved December 5, 2014.