From Asia Times, January 19:
China-financed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is Africa's largest and most divisive development project
The Chinese-financed Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), despite a recent breakdown in talks on Africa’s largest development project, risks powering up a range of downstream tensions and rivalries.
These run from rising rivalry between Egypt and Ethiopia to a festering border war between Ethiopia and neighboring Sudan. At stake, too, is the future of almost 90% of the water in the Nile River, the world’s longest waterway.
Egypt, where millions depend on the river for their livelihoods, considers control of the Nile an “existential” issue. Sudan, meanwhile, fears the GERD may seriously endanger its own dams, which depend on water flowing from upstream neighbor Ethiopia.
Yet for Addis Ababa, the GERD is a chance to bring electricity to millions who currently live without power.
Finding a way to address the fears and hopes of all three states has so far eluded negotiators, with frustrated African Union (AU) mediator Naledi Pandor declaring last week that the talks had regretfully “reached a dead end.”
Grand Renaissance
Nearly a mile wide and taking nearly a decade to build, the US$5 billion GERD is “the largest development project in Africa,” Ashok Swain, UNESCO Chair on International Water Cooperation, told Asia Times.
Spanning the Blue Nile – the eastern and far more voluminous of the two branches feeding the river – GERD is also the world’s seventh-largest dam and by far the largest in Africa.
When its giant, 74 billion cubic meter reservoir finally fills – a process begun last summer and which could take 5-15 years – the GERD’s turbines could start generating some 6,000 megawatts a year of electricity....
....MUCH MORE
I blame Tedros, the bought-and-paid-for Chinese mouthpiece at the WHO, formerly terrorizer of Tigray and Ethiopian cholera coverup artist.
Previously:
"'It'll cause a water war': divisions run deep as filling of Nile dam nears""Will Ethiopia’s Disputed Dam Collapse?"
Water Wars: "What is going on between Egypt and Sudan?"
"‘Water war’ escalates between Egypt, Sudan"
