The Egyptian government has announced that, right after Eid al-Fitr, the Ramadan feast Muslims are already celebrating, it will hand land-lease contracts for some 110,000 feddans in the southern area of Toshka to developers; 25 per cent of them to young people. The news raised more doubts than comfort.
Among the most ambitious, and controversial, megaprojects started by the Mubarak regime was the Toshka project. The project entailed building a series of canals and a pumping station to carry water from Lake Nasser, the Aswan High Dam reservoir which stretches south of Aswan and into the Sudan, to irrigate some half a million acres in the Western Desert to turn them into arable land. If successful, the recovered land should increase Egypt’s arable land area by 10 per cent, create 2.8 million new jobs and attract over 16 million people to the new towns planned by 2020.
In March 2005, the Mubarak Pumping Station—centrepiece of the Toshka Project—was named one of the five most outstanding civil engineering achievements of the year by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). The project also involved the construction of50km of the main transfer canal, four additional 22km side branches and 800m of feeder pipeline. The complete development project should cost someUSD70 billion.
Small plots
The project provoked its share of controversy. Sceptics leered at the wisdom of developing water-hungry agricultural production, reclaiming land in the hottest part of the country and the likelihood that long-term economic benefit will benefit foreign investors rather than Egyptians.
It was no secret that the development required sizeable funds, so the land to be recovered was parcelled out to investors. Major among them was the Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal who purchased some 100,000 feddans in 1998, soon after the project began.
Following the 25 January 2011 Revolution, questions were asked as to the legality of the contracts which had been concluded with investors by the previous regime. It was claimed that the Toshka land purchased by Prince bin Talal included provisions that violated the law and gave the company unjustified benefits, upon which Egyptian authorities ordered his assets frozen. But the prince waived his rights to the land, and the land then effectively moved into the hands of the Egyptian government.
The idea proposed by the government then was to parcel out the land and sell it to investors. Plots of 20,000 feddans would be offered to agrarian reform investors, public and private. Five and ten feddan plots would be leased to young Egyptians, graduates of agriculture or veterinary medicine schools—with priority given to participants in the 25 January Revolution or their families.
The government announced that, with 98 per cent of the work on the Toshka project completed, 3700 feddans of arable land would be allocated to Nubians. The Nubians had suffered badly owing to the construction of the High Dam in the 1960s, since their land drowned under Lake Nasser and they had to relocate northwards. During the recent years, they have been vociferously asking to be given priority in the allocation of lands for agrarian or tourist projects on the banks of Lake Nasser or in Toshka.
Excessive cost
According to a report by the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), the first feasibility study ever to be conducted for the Toshka project was done some 17 months after the project began. The report pointed out that the nearest marketing centre for Toshka crops is Aswan, some 220kms away. The produce has to be air-freighted, thus incurring huge transport costs.
The project’s single water resource is Lake Nasser. The irrigation of the project takes some 5.5 cubic billion metres of water, which amounts to 10 per cent of Egypt’s total quota of Nile water. The irrigation of one feddan in Toshka costs some EGP6000 annually, according to the report, taking in the cost of pumping the water and the electricity related to the operation. The project uses up 10 per cent of the electricity generated by the High Dam, which represents a threat to other projects in Egypt. The establishment of the necessary infrastructure for irrigation
raises the cost of irrigation per feddan to EGP10,000 a year. This, in addition to the EGP10,000 cost of cultivating one feddan, would work to make Toshka produce excessively costly.
The CAPMAS report suggests means of escape from the current crisis in two or three years time. One is to manage the project—as the High Dam is currently being efficiently managed—via a central administration that would report directly to the Prime Minister. Work should start on four parallel axes: economising on the current use of water; negotiating with the Nile Basin countries to increase Egypt’s quota of Nile water; building a well-serviced urban town to house project workers and conduct business; and a solar energy power plant to serve the pumping stations. This last plan could save a billion EGP’s worth of High Dam electricity annually, according to the report.
Attracting the young
“The project is still ongoing and can achieve a quantum leap given that the remaining land will be reclaimed and cultivated,” Hussein Taha, head of the project’s central administration, told Watani. “But the serious predicament now is how to attract new graduates, especially when the cost of infrastructure for one feddan has gone up to more than EGP15,000. To say nothing
of summer temperatures that normally go up 50 degrees Celsius, making it impossible to work the land at the time.”
Mr Taha explains that plots of land are handed out to investors with only basic water infrastructure, and the investors themselves carry out the other underground work to prepare the land for cultivation. The State should assume its responsibility in providing a complete infrastructure for cultivation, Mr Taha says. There are currently no small investors in Toshka, and there are only four large companies, among which only one Egyptian. Small investors complain they cannot get bank loans using the land lease contracts as assets.
But even if young people manage to somehow come up with the money needed, Mr Taha says, they cannot be attracted to the place unless there is suitable housing and services such as schools and hospitals.
“Offering plots of agricultural land in Toshka for young people is a very important move, especially when there is nothing left for the government to do in order to accommodate the growing numbers of unemployed,” says Ziyad al-Minshawi, an agricultural development expert. “But, will the State make sure to set up a complete urban community and provide it with homes, hospitals, schools and police stations? Will it extend a rail link to the project? Will it be able to secure and provide marketing and selling centres for the produce which, being mainly fruit and vegetable, may quickly rot?
Leasehold possession
Ali al-Menoufi, the Toshka technical office director, reminds that dividing Toshka into 5-feddan and 10-feddan plots is just not practical since the irrigation system was only designed to accommodate large areas.
Economic expert Mukhtar al-Sharif told Watani that the issue of how the land would be handed to the young people was still ambiguous. The lease system, he explains, is not popular in the case of agricultural land. In the Toshka project where the land is to be leased for 49 years, young people have complained that it would not act as collateral in case they need bank loans.
Mr Sharif, however, is more worried about the infrastructure needed for the project than about the lease or ownership. “What is the benefit of leasing the land if it does not hold the necessary infrastructure?” he asks.
He agrees with Taha and Minshawi in that cultivation and transport costs in Toshka are exorbitant. The project’s original design divided the Toshka area into large plots allocated to large investors. “The young people’s dreams should not be trifled with,” Sherif says. “How are they to overcome major impediments such as bad weather, scarcity of water and marketing the produce?”
Again, Samer al-Mufti, former secretary-general to the Desert Research Centre, believes that leasing agricultural land contradicts with the nature of Egyptian peasant, whose ownership of his land is one of the tenets of agriculture. Lease can work, he suggests, with cosmopolitan firms and large investors but, on an individual basis, agriculture relies very much on the residency of the peasant in his own land.
Not realistic
Tamer Saïd, a Faculty of Agriculture graduate, thinks that official declarations are not realistic. “How come they declare Toshka is not arable in summer, and a few weeks later it is to be allocated to young people against a rent for three to five years?” He and other new graduates, he adds, do not have enough funds to start on such projects.
Abdel-Moneim Bayoumi, an agriculturalist on a private farm, thinks privileges should be granted if young people are to be motivated to move into Toshka. Right from the beginning, he says, the project targeted large investors with sufficient expertise and money. “But now the land has returned to the Egyptians. If there is an honest will to help us as young people own this land, the State should provide us with housing and basic services. We are ready to sustain the arid weather and heat if we can lead a decent life there with our families.”
Bayoumi quotes former minister Ahmed al-Guweili who said: “Toshka is not an agricultural project, rather an urban programme. It will only thrive as a global developmental programme. Without that it will be like a large prison where we throw young people and invite them to commit suicide.”
WATANI International
19 August 2012
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