Egypt

Egypt has a large and growing population, currently, estimated at over 100 million and expected to rise to exceed 150 million by the year 2050 if present growth rates continue. The country is almost entirely desert with virtually no rainfall. The country’s renewable water resources are restricted to the flow of the Nile River, although there is limited exploitation of non-renewable underground water in the oases of the Western Desert. Egypt’s share of the Nile River flow is governed by a treaty signed with its southern neighbor, Sudan, in 1959 and set at 55.5 billion cubic meters per year. Since the national water supply is fixed at this amount, continued population growth inevitably means increasing national water scarcity, and Egypt is already under the international standard of 1,000 cubic meters per person per year. Furthermore, the water shortage crises of Egypt will be increased drastically due to the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. In addition, over 85% of the annual water supply is devoted to agricultural production, and Egyptian farmers practice one of the most intensified forms of irrigated agriculture in the world, achieving global records for yield per hectare in a number of major food crops. Despite impressive gains in the 1980’s and 1990’s, agricultural production has not kept pace with population growth, and Egypt has a net food import bill of over $6 billion. 

In Egypt, under limited water supply conditions, providing additional resources through desalination or other means will be an expensive option. Therefore, efforts towards the optimal management of available water resources should concentrate on the demand management side. As the agricultural sector is consuming the bulk of water supply, good management of irrigation water can be translated into significant savings in the available water resources. In addition, the agriculture sector will be the most affected by anticipated future water shortages and will be expected to relinquish water to other uses such as the domestic and the industrial sectors. Consequently, increasing the efficient use of water in the agricultural sector is an overarching goal driving policy changes and promotion of new technologies targeting improvements in on-farm water management and maximization of agricultural return per unit of water.

In the last two decades, replacing surface irrigation with precise irrigation systems became the main interest of the decision makers and policy planners in Egypt. Land fragmentation, capital and operating costs, profitability, and the need for qualified labor are the main challenges in converting from surface to pressurized irrigation systems. Rather than converting, surface irrigation systems can be upgraded to perform as efficiently as most other irrigation methods using hybrid techniques. To achieve higher efficiency and uniformity in the surface irrigation systems, all parts of the irrigated field should receive water for a near equal period of time, with a minimum of water losses to runoff or to deep percolation below the root zone. 

A range of practices, including land leveling, reuse of tailwater (i.e., reuse of water that runs off the downstream end of surface irrigated fields), raised beds, cutback irrigation, and surge-flow irrigation can be employed to improve the effectiveness of surface irrigation. These best management practices and strategies can all contribute to improving the efficiencies of surface irrigation, but these measures still do not enable the performance of the surface irrigation to match that of the pressurized irrigation methods. 

In Egypt, rice provides 27% of dietary energy supply and 20% of dietary protein intake; therefore, enhancing the productivity of rice will alleviate poverty, eradicate hunger, and contribute to the national food security and economic development. Consequently, rice has become one of the most important exports in the agricultural sector. The area cultivated with rice is growing gradually in the Nile Delta. It increased from about 280,000 ha by the mid-70’s to about 0.8 million ha in 2013. This rapid increase in rice cultivation has resulted from its increasing profitability compared to other crops. The drastic increase in water use for rice cultivation is augmenting the pressure on water supplies; it consumes about 29-50% of the total water budget of Egypt, and threatens to undermine the availability of water for reclaiming new lands. In light of this, innovative ideas such as hybrid irrigation, multi-nozzle sprinkler irrigation, and surface and subsurface drip irrigation technologies, as well as raised bed and system of rice intensification (SRI) practices will be adopted to modernize and further increase the efficiency of surface irrigation systems and rice productivity.