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Egypt Is Building a New Nile
- JumpCrisscross 3mo agoDo we have a better source? This article contains repeating text which makes me suspect copy-pasted slop. EDIT: This [1] is better. [1] https://meobserver.org/nutrition/2026/05/18/egypts-new-delta-megaproject-signals-strategic-shift-in-food-security-and-national-development/ https://meobserver.org/nutrition/2026/05/18/egypts-new-delta...
- kristjansson 3mo agoI'd suspect it's a transcript of a video on his (excellent) YouTube[0], hence the repetition. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/@TheB1M https://www.youtube.com/@TheB1M
- culi 3mo agoIt's a great channel if you don't care about any degree of technical debt and wanna see someone glaze over human rights violations in order to celebrate mega projects. I'd at least highly recommend the DeArrow extensions to de-clickbait this channel's titles. As much as I criticize the channel, I admit I can't look away
- legitster 3mo agoHe quite often gets into problematic areas of many projects - see his series on Billionaires row in New York. There's just an exceeding amount of signal to noise ratio when it comes to big projects. Criticism of foreign projects comes out of the woodwork by non-local sources, and yet we seem to accept the human toll on Western projects like the Hoover Dam or the Channel Tunnel. Him taking a neutral tone and accepting source materials at face value is fair. Mega-projects have been a defining feature of human civilization since its inception, so there's ultimately not a way to cover them that is not either glamorizing or unbearably self-loathing.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago> we seem to accept the human toll on Western projects like the Hoover Dam or the Channel Tunnel The human toll of both is commonly brought up, including at the sites.
- culi 3mo agoI meant depth* not debt. Too late to edit but to embarrassing to not address.
- andsoitis 3mo agoPossibly better source: https://www.arabnews.com/node/2619542/business-economy https://www.arabnews.com/node/2619542/business-economy
- RetroTechie 3mo agoHuh? Different project.
- RetroTechie 3mo agoWiki: "A feddan (Arabic: فدّان, romanized: faddān) is a unit of area used in Egypt, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Oman. In Classical Arabic, the word means 'a yoke of oxen', implying the area of ground that could be tilled by oxen in a certain time. In Egypt, the feddan is the only non-metric unit which remained in use following the adoption of the metric system. A feddan is divided into 24 kirat (Arabic: قيراط, qīrāt), with one kirat equalling 175 square metres." So 2.2M feddan works out to 9240 km^2. That is: roughly same area as a square with 96 km sides. "Officials indicate the system will utilise roughly 10 million cubic metres of surface water daily alongside approximately 7.5 million cubic metres of treated drainage water per day, reflecting Egypt’s growing reliance on advanced water-recycling and smart-irrigation technologies amid mounting regional water pressures." Article isn't clear on where either component comes from. Not an amount you could divert from somewhere without huge environmental effects elsewhere. (Edit: quote is from the ME Observer article a commenter linked below. Original post seems to have more details) Anyway sounds like an ambitious project. And understandable given Egypt's population vs. resources pressures (esp. water).
- aidenn0 3mo agoSo similar origin to the Imperial acre; which it is very close in size to: You have: 175*24m^2 You want: acre * 1.0378426 / 0.96353724
- legitster 3mo agoA lot of where they are getting water from right now is an ancient underground aquifer - there's not a lot of water there though, so the plan was it was a stopgap while the water recycling plan comes online. Although the aquifer water plan itself is largely failing. The underground water was much more saline than they originally thought, so from space you can see lots of failed irrigation circles.
- yread 3mo ago10 million cubic meters per day is roughly 100 cubic meters per second. Aswan discharges 2800 m3/s on average. So around 4% of the flow
- hparadiz 3mo agoThis could completely terraform the weather for the entire region. Possibly even increasing the amount of rain in the middle east overall.
- HeyLaughingBoy 3mo agoAren't they already on Terra, or did I miss something?
- daedrdev 3mo agoThis is not the first project like this Egypt has tried. All have failed
- alephnerd 3mo agoState and financial capacity is much stronger in Egypt today versus previous attempts. Egypt's developmental indicators have finally caught up to where the CEE was 5-10 years ago but with a better demographic profile, and Gulf and Asian capital and technology partners are much more hands-on.
- cherryteastain 3mo agoIf you look at UNDP historical HDI data [1] you will see that Egypt barely caught up with the HDI levels of poorest Eastern European countries like Moldova from 10 years ago and is still well behind the HDI levels of better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990. [1] https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/indicies/HDI https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/in...
- alephnerd 3mo agoAnd there was no guarantee that Egypt would have reached this point today in 2026. A decade ago, the safer bet would have been that Egypt would collapse just like it's then developmental peer Syria. The fact that Egypt is at this point today is a testament to the fact that it's has robust enough state capacity that it was able to execute on projects. > better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990 Czechia is not Eastern Europe and was a very developed country. I'll wait for inglor_cz to eventually jump into this convo and give context around Czechoslovakia and Central Europe in the 1980s to 90s.
- cherryteastain 3mo agoSyria had an extremely destructive civil war and one of the worst collapses in living standards ever of any country (measured by however you want to look at it - HDI, GDP/capita...) Meanwhile Egypt was overtaken by Vietnam and performed similarly to peers like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Algeria, Philippines. Egypt's and Sisi's performance is decidedly average.
- culi 3mo agoIt's practically a project of the Egyptian military who will mostly own the land. They will grow cash crops for export to gain a source of income. This will also drain the ancient and non-renewable Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. This is water that has been trapped for thousands of years. It is the world's largest fossil water system and is of immense scientific value. Not to mention the historic Nile Delta wetlands that will be lost from diversion and the massive increases in CO2 emissions necessary to pump the water at the elevation of the desert (which is higher than the Nile basin). Also the inevitable salination of soil means any economic benefits to this project are on a countdown.
- alephnerd 3mo ago> It's practically a project of the Egyptian military who will mostly own the land It's a public-private project with Gulf and Asian financing and execution. Sisi is a dictator, but he can and does execute. Look at how Egypt's developmental indicators have shot up over the past decade - that was not guaranteed, and he deftly took advantage of non-Western partners to push the reforms Egypt needs.
- eddythompson80 3mo agoWhich developmental indicators are you referring to? Almost all economical numbers mean nothing if the country is a dictatorship because the admin can straight up fabricate all of them. Administrations in democracies have to manipulate the numbers, introduce new ones, etc while dictatorships can just say "Nah, make that number 20% higher". You can look at the EGP exchange rate over the last 10 years and tell me if that chart looks organic to you.
- rayiner 3mo agoThat's not how it works. Egypt is not a closed country. International organizations can get in and get numbers. It's also worth keeping in mind that many European countries, and every non-European country that's now developed, went through a phase of authoritarianism or one-party rule during which the organs of state developed. Germany's and Italy's modern democratic governments date to the end of WWII, and Spain and Greece's date only to the 1970s. By contrast, efforts to jump straight to multi-party democracy have largely failed.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- ojbyrne 3mo agoThis article has several passages repeated verbatim. Either bad AI or bad editing, not really a great advertisement for the product (“Brilliant”) it seems to be selling. Example: “The construction of the Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, brought clear benefits. It provided a steady supply of hydroelectric power and allowed water to be regulated for year-round irrigation.” appears twice, word for word.
- Fnoord 3mo agoI skimmed through the article. Several pictures are also repeated. Would this kind of thing happen before 2020? I don't think so. Either way, I got taught in high school geography that parts of rivers get rebuild all the time. The Maas (Meuse, as Dutch is my native language I say Maas) gets longer due to the corners getting more sharp (due to water and wind erosion). Then at some point, the water might actually go straight between two corners, leading to the part between the two corners (an extra 180 degrees of two corners, though might look like one) getting cut. Sometimes, that doesn't happen (quick enough) and humans need to help nature a bit. Because sometimes, the new part of river tends to reach villages or other parts of society humans want to preserve. So, we interfere. Near Maastricht, there's also a canal next to the Maas, and this can help with deficit or excess water in the Maas. But sometimes, even an extra part of river next to the old river is build. IIRC they do that because the erosion destroyed such parts, that the outcome of the erosion keeps coming back and back in too short amounts of time. So then, it makes more sense to look for a more long term solution. The water and wind erosion were interesting to me back in the days. So, from memory (and I surely am forgetting something here, possibly related to the chemistry of the water/earth), the way it works on low water level the wind on the corners erodes the corners, while on high water level the water pressurizes against the corner, leading to basins in the (wind eroded) corner which itself is part of the domino effect. In other words, it is bound to happen, given time. The river snaking around is bound to happen, and the breach is bound to happen as well. But the breach usually means the river goes to its original pathway (although temporarily). So for a large river as the Nile, it also comes as no surprise Egyptian government (Egypt being the country who benefit from the Nile delta) invests in the Nile. But the main problem the Nile faces is AFAIK related to drought which is related to climate. I'm not sure how they want to fix that.
- gl-prod 3mo agoEgypt is trapped in mega projects death spiral
- ButlerianJihad 3mo agoEgypt is also hard at work transforming the Sinai Plain and the vicinity of Mount Sinai itself, into a tourist magnet, and a thriving hotel/resort region. The monks of St. Katherine's monastery are nonplussed about these developments. (Many monasteries and convents in modern times are renowned, and/or an open secret, for their peaceful hospitality, and gladly welcome pilgrims and tourists for overnight stays, especially in places where the hotels are in short supply, and especially in places like Republic of Ireland, where the monasteries' populations are dwindling, and losing donors, while the tourist trade is stronger every day...)
- betaby 3mo agoWith a such rapid demographic growth they have no choice. The population of Egypt doubled in last ~35 years. (quadrupled in the last ~60 years)
- nradov 3mo agoThat's true for now, although their rate of population growth appears to have peaked several years ago and like most other countries the birth rate has since declined sharply. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Egypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Egypt
- sajithdilshan 3mo agoHow is that even sustainable, like housing, education, electricity, running water, etc. how can they scale those with that fast growing population
- lazide 3mo agoGrow more crops, build more dams, etc? Until they are out of room anyway, but they have a lot of unused desert right now.
- BurningFrog 3mo agoTypically, people produce about as much as they consume, so a growing population normally sustains itself.
- nradov 3mo agoThe article makes a good point about food imports to Egypt. I think a lot of people don't realize that Egypt has been an innocent victim of Russia's invasion of Ukraine which disrupted wheat exports. Recent strikes by Ukraine on Russian oil refineries are in turn disrupting Russian grain harvests due to shortages of diesel fuel. While this is a legitimate defensive tactic by Ukraine, as a side effect it's likely to cause further food price inflation in Egypt.
- bamboozled 3mo agoMaybe the Egyptian government could pressure Putin to stop killing innocent people and sending young men to the front to needlessly die, how about that ?
- nradov 3mo agoSounds good, I hope they do. But as a practical matter Egypt is in a difficult spot because they import wheat from both Ukraine and Russia. And Egypt has no real leverage with Putin.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3mo agoI don't believe it.