Ah yes, the water wars of the future are here.
Ethiopia's controversial mega-dam on Nile tributary
81–90 of 148 posts
Re: Ethiopia's controversial mega-dam on Nile tributary
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is amazing seeing how many lies can a single comment have > More than half of Ethiopia's 110 million people have no electric power Might be true but it is a wide problem and have a root causes that not all belong to the current issue, maybe you forget you are currently in a civil war with army have actions that are war crimes. >More than 80% of the Nile waters come out of Ethiopia Nile river is historically and fr…
> Nile river is historically and from legal perspective an international river not an Ethiopian property Ethiopia has never claimed the Nile is its sole property. It's seeking fair use of a dam on its own territory and equitable sharing of the waters in a manner that doesn't infringes on its sovereignty. >...a Wikipedia page the list all of Ethiopian dams I don't see a single dam aside from the GERD on the list that'…
> I don't see a single dam aside from the GERD on the list that's on the Nile. So I don't see how you could say it's a lie. Are you suggesting a dam on any tributary river in Ethiopia is subject to Egypt's wishes?
It sounds obvious to me that a dam on a tributary river to Nile is for the purpose of the problem here like a dam on Nile since it reduces the water available downwards in Nile.
Re: Ethiopia's controversial mega-dam on Nile tributary
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also to put things in context, if they rename Egypt to Nile: The Country , it would be more accurate. Egypt is a country of 100 million people, all of them living next to the Nile or in its delta. It's unbelievable how much Egypt is dependant on Nile for its existence. Any disruption in Nile will have severe negative effects on the lives of 100 million people and be an existential threat to Egypt. Just take a look at…
> all of them living next to the Nile or in its delta Your own heat map shows that this isn’t the case - they also live on the coast.
> they also live on the coast.
That's the delta.
Re: Ethiopia's controversial mega-dam on Nile tributary
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not a betting man, but, "Egyptian political leaders on Monday met Morsi to discuss the report. Apparently unaware their discussion was being televised live, some of them proposed hostile acts including aiding rebels inside Ethiopia and destroying the dam itself." From: https://web.archive.org/web/20130606172030/http://www.washin...
You are quoting a scandal that happened about 7 years ago with a fundamentally different government. So much happened since then in the Egyptian political scene. A coup d'etat deposed that incompetent Islamist government and instilled a new dictator who has a very different agenda.
The dam has been under construction for over 10 years now. The motives for these two men are different but when it comes to the Dam, they are aligned
Moreover, the west has a vested interest to keep el-sisi happy. There is a suspicion about the recent political instability in Ethiopia is partly because of Egypt
http://nemozen.semret.org/2021/06/pay-any-price-bear-any-bur...
Re: Ethiopia's controversial mega-dam on Nile tributary
#85Let's say Ethopia goes through with this. Would it be cheaper to start a war against them or spend money on tech to reduce dependence on the Nile? I imagine that a campaign to improve education in Egypt and train the populace for jobs to reduce Nile dependence would be a major boost to the Egyptian economy. It might drive the country to innovate and fuel a boom in their tech and engineering sector. Are there any feas…
You probably can't do it fast enough. Also without water, you'll likely have more serious problems than educating the population or creating high-tech stuff.
Re: Ethiopia's controversial mega-dam on Nile tributary
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's entirely besides the point, which is that the comment I replied to rested fundamentally on ignoring the sustained drop, which has resumed, to push a narrative of Egypt being an exception to fertility rates dropping as a country develops.
Well, the original topic of this discussion is water scarcity, and that is determined by absolute # of people living in the Nile basin. Not by just TFR. One can argue that in order to achieve sustainable levels of population, the TFR should have dropped much more and much earlier than it actually did, and discuss the reasons why the decline wasn't as fast. After all, with the concentration of people in the Nile delta…
One can argue about why the decline wasn't as fast, but the the comment I replied to misrepresented the development and then tried to blame Islam and Egyptian culture while pointing to muslim Bangladesh as a comparison, without addressing how Islam is relevant as a cause in Egypt but not Bangladesh. It's not a good starting point for discussing why. It gets worse when considering that had it not been for the few years of reversal a decade ago, Egypt would have been on track to similar levels as Bangladesh.
Which means that any serious attempt at addressing why would have focused on the causes of that reversal rather than attempt at blaming a culture that did not prevent several decades of continuous drops.
> After all, with the concentration of people in the Nile delta, everyone had to be aware of the fact that their country is becoming dangerously overcrowded by 1990 at least. Possibly sooner.
The only place where attempting to address population growth by government intervention appears to have worked at scale is China, backed by decades of campaigning and authoritarian government intervention. We simply don't know of any effective non-authoritarian method of having large-scale impact on population growth short of economic development.
So this is largely moot. Yes, people have known for a long time, but have not had means to do much about it.
Re: Ethiopia's controversial mega-dam on Nile tributary
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nile river is historically and from legal perspective an international river not an Ethiopian property Ethiopia has never claimed the Nile is its sole property. It's seeking fair use of a dam on its own territory and equitable sharing of the waters in a manner that doesn't infringes on its sovereignty. >...a Wikipedia page the list all of Ethiopian dams I don't see a single dam aside from the GERD on the list that'…
> I don't see a single dam aside from the GERD on the list that's on the Nile. So I don't see how you could say it's a lie. Are you suggesting a dam on any tributary river in Ethiopia is subject to Egypt's wishes? It sounds obvious to me that a dam on a tributary river to Nile is for the purpose of the problem here like a dam on Nile since it reduces the water available downwards in Nile.
I just had a look at the list, and I feel that looking at 'dams' is pretty misleading. The point is to look at capacity, no? I mean, nobody in their right mind cares if somebody builds a dam that has a capacity of half a cubic kilometer.
So it's a weird dialogue: on the one hand, the only relevant dam, capacity-wise, is the GERD. On the other, there are patently plenty of other damns in the Nile river basin.
(Obviously, anybody who is more aware of the issues here should correct me - my feeling is that Ethiopia and Egypt are being weirdly bellicose over an issue that is totally solvable to mutual satisfaction.)
Re: Ethiopia's controversial mega-dam on Nile tributary
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
This shouldn't be voted down into oblivion. Some truths are uncomfortable to hear, but that doesn't make them less true. When I was in Egypt, everywhere I looked I saw signs of overpopulation and an idle, largely uneducated workforce standing around half the day in bread lines kilometres long.
It starts with a claim that is fundamentally false, though: the suggestion that Egypt's fertility rate is not dropping. I hesitate to call it a lie, because it could simply be that they have not looked up the numbers. But it is questionable when they took time to look up a population pyramid but neglected to look up the actual fertility rate over time which would have immediately invalidated the central pillar of a c…
You're right, its not dropping: its rising
Egypt fertility rate 2006: 3.01
2018: 3.28
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
Contrasted against neighbours Jordan and Saudi Arabia which show much more consistent declines and are now both down to aobout 2.3.
Re: Ethiopia's controversial mega-dam on Nile tributary
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, the original topic of this discussion is water scarcity, and that is determined by absolute # of people living in the Nile basin. Not by just TFR. One can argue that in order to achieve sustainable levels of population, the TFR should have dropped much more and much earlier than it actually did, and discuss the reasons why the decline wasn't as fast. After all, with the concentration of people in the Nile delta…
One can argue about why the decline wasn't as fast, but the the comment I replied to misrepresented the development and then tried to blame Islam and Egyptian culture while pointing to muslim Bangladesh as a comparison, without addressing how Islam is relevant as a cause in Egypt but not Bangladesh. It's not a good starting point for discussing why. It gets worse when considering that had it not been for the few year…
AFAIK post-1989 Iran had a huge drop in fertility coupled with government intervention:
" The decline was slow until the government population policy was reversed and a new family planning program was officially inaugurated in December 1989. Total fertility rate fell sharply after 1989, dropping from 5.5 in 1988 to below 2.8 in 1996, more than a 50 per cent decline in 6 years. The own-children estimates of fertility for Iran based on the 2000 Iran Demographic and Health Survey show that the TFR has declined further and reached replacement level (2.26) during the period 1998-2000. The figure for the year 2000 is 2.17."
Source: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
Re: Ethiopia's controversial mega-dam on Nile tributary
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
> * More than half of Ethiopia's 110 million people have no electric power. > * Almost all of Ethiopia is under some level of food stress. Where is a country like Ethiopia getting all the money for such a mega-project? > * This happened due to Colonial era agreements in which great Britain Typical, colonial forces left a mess everywhere they went. India-Pakistan, Israel-Palestine, pretty much all of Africa, my histor…
> things still are in such disarray so long after they retreated What is “so long”? Reading online, I see that Ethiopia was not fully colonized, but Europe/UK were attacking and meddling in its affairs even in the 1930s. What most of the West doesn’t realize, is that colonization is majorly impactful and leads to disarray for decades, if not centuries. Countries need time to stabilize, after being systematically dism…
Is this the case?
This seems to take the view that pre-colonisation these countries were modern functioning states; and that it was the coloniser which "destabilised them".
However this seems to be rarely, if ever, the case. Colonised countries were extremely pre-modern compared to coloniser-states, and as far as I'm aware, routinely the purpose of colonisation was to establish such thing as a functioning state -- for the sake of enabling trade and commerce to be conducted reliably.
Here we should also distinguish the activities of a coloniser-state (eg., the UK) vs., eg., that of an individual eg., Leopold.