The Water Crisis in the Nile River Basin

Zachary Gainer

24 November 2014

Mr. Carothers

Multi-Cultural Studies

The Water Crisis in the Nile River Basin

"In Africa, water is critical to the survival of over one-third of the population and at least 300 million people lack any constant access to water and over 313 million people lack proper sanitation if they can even access water." says one article on the Nile River Crisis currently afflicting all that depend on the Nile as a source of water, transportation, and food. The water crisis around the world is well emulated by the in class experiment our class did with goldfish and the mentality that is presented by tragedy of commons, "if we don't take it, someone else will."

Recently, the Nile River Basin, is suffering significant issues relating to water shortages in addition to major disputes on ownership rights between the ten major nations surrounding the Nile itself. Much of these shortages and disputes stem from over consumption of available resources, persistent droughts, increasing soil salinity and industrial use of the Nile. These previously listed causes are adversely affecting the nations that utilize and totally rely on the Nile as a main source of water in several ways. The primary effect would be that of political and territorial disputes. Egypt claims natural rights upon the Nile, and considers any actions that impede or reduce Egypts resources taken from the Nile would be considered as an act of war. In addition, the increasing soil salinity has majorly influenced the agricultural economy with in countries that rely on the Nile for agrarian purposes. To top it off, droughts and pollution caused by industries limits what little water is available to drink in the first place. Several solutions have been put into place in order to attempt to remedy the situation at hand, but none have come to fruition of any sort. The most known of the attempted solutions, the Nile River Basin Agreement of 1929 was put into place in hopes of facilitating the redistribution of water resources; however, this agreement immensely favoured Egypt, and hindered many of the other surrounding nations, most notably that of Ethiopia.

One viable solution would be that of a fair and proportional method of distribution of water to the nations surrounding the Nile through a third/impartial outside force. First, a impartial, unbiased, and fair third party remediary would need to be chosen in order to decide a proportional distribution method that would benefit all the surrounding nations--this could be the EU or the UN, both