In all cases, as long as it acted normally, the Nile did not represent any danger to farmers. Rather, the familiarity with the change of the river directed a farmer's behaviour towards a progressive support of the water supply benefits and control of obvious dangers. This was reflected in the invention of various agriculture tools and irrigation equipment. It was only during the nineteenth century when governmental interventions in the management of the Nile system came into the construction of large-scale water structures.
The whole system was, for the first time, dealt with as an basic unit. The construction and remodelling of the old Delta Barrages, which started in 1843, followed by the creation of the new Delta Barrages 1939, allowed the introduction of perennial irrigation in limited areas of the agricultural land. However, the growing need for generalising perennial irrigation at a national scale, making full use of the Nile water and protecting against extremely high as well as low floods encouraged the idea of building a mass storage water structure at the system inlet. A large dam was built at Aswan for this purpose and called the Aswan High Dam.
The climate surrounding the Nile today is very different to what it was hundreds of years ago. When the River Nile was swamp like, the River banks were covered by forests. Even in 1886 the Nile’s flood plane was covered in green fields. The Nile Delta was a broad swamp of around 10,000 miles2 whose climate was affected by the Mediterranean Sea the brought a winter rainy season. However the rest of the Nile in Egypt gets little or no rain so there is very little change in season. Therefore farming is made easier along the upper parts of the Nile in Egypt because crops can be grown all year round.
Evaluation of the Dams construction
Advantages
There are many advantages of the Aswan Dam these are shown and explained below.
Helping Egypt to develop:
The formation of the Lake Nasser reservoir creates HEP opportunities and controls flooding. This helps Egypt to develop in two ways. Firstly it provides the electricity needed for people and industry to increase their and to stop the flooding which ruins so many livelihoods and claims lives. Lake Nasser’s resources are potentially economic, including land cultivation and settlement, fishing and tourism.
River is more Navigable
Bigger boats can now travel down the River Nile. These boats carry cargo and people who are on cruises. The Aswan Dam has made the River Nile more navigable meaning that more boats can use the River. This is shown by the attitude of the Official for tourism and leisure. “I am very happy with the creation of the new dam I know that there have been complaints from lots of different people but what many people fail to realise is that if we do not find a way of making some money for our country then we will not be able to develop in the same way as countries like the U.K. and the U.S.A” Although this is only one persons opinion and there are a lot more, it shows that people understand things have to be done if they want to build up into a more economically developed country. The Dam has created money because it has enhanced tourism in the country. The lake that has formed behind the dam, Lake Nasser is used for sports like wind surfing and water skiing all year long. This means that there are jobs for people in the surrounding area. This will encourage growth so more people move around the area. That means there will be more money and the country or area is on its way to developing.
Electricity for homes and industry:
HEP is used to generate electricity that is taken to homes and industries by pylons. Electricity generation by the dam now supplies 45% of Egypt’s total requirements. In 1976, Egypt completed an impressive rural electrification programme that was only feasible because of Dam’s Hydro electric power output. It has 12 turbines or engines which produce 10 billion kilowatts of electricity every year. The water from the Nile turns the turbines and makes electricity.
Flood control:
Control of flooding is carried out by the dam. By keeping so much water back in Lake Nasser, the River Nile rarely floods the surrounding farmland any more. As a result of this many lives and damage to the Egyptian economy were saved.
New farmland created:
The act of keeping back the water from the River Nile has lowered its level, effectively creating new farmland by the river sides. This is also less prone to flooding.
Irrigation water for nearby farmland:
Development of irrigation channels from Lake Nasser, takes water from the reservoir to the nearby farmland for watering crops.
Fish stocks in Lake Nasser:
Fish live in the lake and can be fished more easily by those fishermen who used to fish in the River Nile. This should improve their livelihoods and fish stocks can be replaced more easily. Fisheries have been successfully developed. Fish is now the most important source of protein. In Egypt fish is now half the price of meat.
Disadvantages
There are many disadvantages caused by the Aswan Dam. These are shown and explained below:
High set-up costs of building the dam:
Egypt had to borrow a great deal of money from the Russians to set this dam up. The dam was financed by the help of the Soviet Union, few years after the war inflicted upon Egypt by Israel, France and Britain. Of the total cost of US$1 billion, about 1/3 seems to have been a gift from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union provided 400 technicians for the work. The Soviet Union were communist that believed nature was there to be exploited, this maybe why they were so generous. Although, Egypt will still be repaying the loans back for a very long time and so it is doubtful whether this will help Egypt to develop at all.
Loss of fish from River delta
Although there is a vast increase in the amount of fish in Lake Nasser there has been a significant decrease in sardines and anchovies that were important food sources caught near the mouths of the two branches of the Nile. The Mediterranean Sea can be generally considered as a "desert" in terms of fish production, due to its very low supply of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen that are required for the microscopic marine green plants to accomplish photosynthesis. As a result, marine fishing in Egypt had been important only in the immediate vicinity of the Nile outflow, especially in the months following annual flooding. Immediately after the High Dam was completed and the last Nile flood had occurred, the fishery of coastal Egypt collapsed, and has never recovered.
Irrigated farmland suffers from salination:
When water evaporates in these hot areas, it brings salts to the soil surface. This is called salination and it is not good for the soils or the crops. If too much salt rises to the surface, it can kill the plants and reduce yields. When the crops are irrigated the water evaporates after time leaving the salt baked into the sand. When the water is next moistened the salt dissolves and seeps deeper underground towards the roots of crops or where the roots will grow. This happens time after time and eventually in not too long a period of time the soil eventually becomes infertile due to the amounts of salt. Look at diag. Below.
Brick Manufacturers
The most important building material in rural Egypt has always been bricks made from Nile River sediments, mostly obtained by dredging of the canal network following annual floods. After the floods ceased in the mid 1960's, there was no new supply of sediments to be cleared from the canals, and some farmers began to sell their top soil to small-scale brick manufacturing plants. Although this gave an immediate return of cash to the farmer who mined his fields for soil, it then took the land involved out of agricultural production, or made it much more difficult to use because of the need for very careful land-level controls for flood irrigation practices. This loss of land has been mostly arrested in the last decade by mining clay deposits from surrounding desert lands that are not feasible to use for agriculture and building much larger brick factories that do not use Nile Delta soils as a raw material. However, this latter development had the negative consequence of eliminating a major source of income from the small-scale brick manufacturers, and transferring the income to large central government enterprises.
Water-borne diseases increase:
As the water in both the reservoir and irrigation channels is contained and in a lot of places static, this encourages the build up of water snails which carry the disease bilharzia. Many other diseases also increase as they are not 'flushed away' by the flow of the River Nile. These snails were unable to get washed out to sea so the disease is becoming more common. If treatment is not found, which in most cases it is not due to money problems the patient may die.
Loss of fertile silt means farmers have to use expensive artificial fertilizer
Much of the fertility of the agricultural soil in Egypt resulted from the continuous re-supply of rich volcanic sediments from the Ethiopian highlands during annual flooding. Since this no longer occurs, it has become necessary to use much greater amounts of commercial fertilizers, such as mineral phosphates and fixed nitrogen. Fixed nitrogen is very energy intensive in terms of production so it represents another drain on Egypt's limited fossil fuel reserves and on foreign currency sources. Total annual commercial fertilizer use per hectare of agricultural land in Egypt during the early 1990's was about 340 kg, one of the highest in the world for any country of appreciable population. The comparable values during the same years for the USA and Japan were 100 kg and 390 kg, respectively. It appears unlikely that higher application rates of commercial fertilizer would significantly improve crop yields in Egypt.
These artificial fertilizers help immensely if the farmer is rich but those who are poor no longer get the free silt deposited on their land after floods they get salt which ruins it. To overcome this they must buy fertilizer, but this fertilizer costs. So if they have no money in the first place then the building of the dam was more of a disadvantage to them. However those who do have money and can afford to purchase these fertilizers are damaging the ecosystem. When the land is irrigated again, or sprinklers are used on the land the fertilizer is flushed into the rivers, making algae grow, this blocks out light which in turn kills off fish because no light can penetrate the surface to create O2. This is called Eutrophication.
Land lost from flooding of Lake Nasser:
Although there were some land gains from the building of the dam, there were much more losses behind the dam where the land was flooded to make the reservoir of Lake Nasser. Many people were moved and made homeless as well as losing their farmland. Over 90,000 Nubians had to be relocated. Those who had been living in Egypt were moved about 45 km away but the Sudanese Nubians were relocated 600 km from their homes. The government was also forced to develop one of the largest Abu Simel temples and dig for artefacts before the future lake would drown the land of the Nubians. Lake Nasser is now steadily filling with sediments () that formerly reached the Delta and the coastal Mediterrean. The current locus of deposition is far upstream of the High Dam and does not immediately threaten operation of the power station (). However, the reservoir will be sufficiently filled within less than a millennium to no longer be useful for storage of irrigation water. Order of magnitude estimates suggest that within about 600 years, about half of the current irrigation water storage value of Lake Nasser will have been lost. In terms of the history of civilization in the Nile Valley, this is not very long. The quantities of sediment filling up Lake Nasser are so huge (about 100 million tons per year) as to defy currently feasible attempts at removal. No one currently has a plausible solution to this problem, which has effectively been postponed for later generations to confront, as is true for many major environmental issues in other countries. The largest sediment dredging operations in the world to maintain some of the most valuable harbours, such as that for New York City, are one-two orders of magnitude smaller than would be required to remove the annual influx of sediment to Lake Nasser.
The record of monthly water volumes in Lake Nasser between 1968 and 1990 illustrate quite dramatically the years of rapid filling which occurred during the 1970's, followed by the major decline in storage volume associated with the drought of the 1980’s. By the time of the large flood runoff from Ethiopia in the summer of 1988, the active storage volume in Lake Nasser had decreased to less than 20 km3, only about 20% of the active volume available during the late 1970's. If the drought had continued another year, there would have been major shortfalls of water deliveries for irrigation agriculture in Egypt.
Evaporation from Lake Nasser is very high:
This is an extremely hot area of the world. Evaporation from Lake Nasser is very high as a consequence and this means a lot of water is lost. 10% of annual water is lost through seepage and evaporation. Transpiration also plays a role in this. The water hyacinth, has invaded the newly formed aquatic system of Lake Nasser. Such weeds will dramatically increase the rate of transpiration. Weeds are almost impossible to remove once established. The Egyptians have dosed their canals and irrigation drains with massive quantities of herbicides, at unknown ecological risk, in the battle to get rid of the water hyacinth. Cutting by hand does very little and diseases are often contracted from doing so. Machinery is needed if it is wanted to be disposed of properly.
Silt builds up in Lake Nasser:
Silt that would normally make its way down river gets trapped behind the dam, lowering the level of the reservoir (along with the evaporation). In addition, this silt would have made its way onto farmland and onto the Nile Delta (see map at top of this page) and this is now causing farmland to become less fertile and the Nile Delta to stop growing. Also, Cairo brick makers are suffering as they no longer have enough silt deposits to make their bricks from.
Natural flooding / silt is lost:
Flooding is an important natural event which enables silt to be placed on farmland, making it more fertile. Without this flooding, the farmland in front of the dam is becoming less fertile. Yields of crops will drop and eventually people may lose money or starve. In addition, those who do not have the luxury of an irrigation channel will suffer from a lack of water entirely.
Conclusion
I personally feel that the Aswan Dam overall was a success to the Egyptian people and economy, although lots of different people share very different views (conflict diag.) I believe that the advantages out weigh the disadvantages, maybe not in number 7-11 but how helpful to Africa and Egyptians in general, rather than selective groups. I think that the disadvantages are aimed at selective groups like the Nubians all being moved although it is a large scale thing and they were not happy, they were moved to better housing, into better education and healthcare. Also things like the lack of fish in the Delta, the numbers are made up for in Lake Nasser, but this may not be convenient as it is miles upstream. The advantages however, help Egypt as a whole, their entire livelihood and economy, maybe not so much the environment though. Like electricity for homes and industry, almost everyone all over the country will benefit from cheaper electricity. In my opinion this is the way forwards for Egypt if they want to become a MEDC. The tourism will be a major factor in this acting as a “honey pot” encouraging western Europeans to travel there and maybe live there encouraging future developments using better western technology. Once good quality of life is firmly established further development can take place. The lasting question is how the silt will be removed from Lake Nasser, because it will eventually have to be done by some means. Other wise Lake Nasser will have such a small capacity that it will no longer be doing its job. The main problem is finance, such large projects in LEDC’s do not usually turn out for the best. One solution, how plausible this may be I am unsure but by continuing with water engineering, providing there is funding, (most of which will be generated by tourism) more dams could be placed further up the River or separate ones for the Blue and White Nile’s digging deep reservoirs before them. Then they could hold back water allowing Lake Nasser to be drained and dredged, gathering all the silt that is possible. This would cause an almighty halt in tourism due to the inability to use Lake Nasser, and surrounding hotels would have few customers other than those perhaps working onsite. Then SLOWLY water can be let through from the Blue and White Niles allowing lake Nasser to be refilled and used as it was before but with a greater capacity and more depth do a lesser percentage of the water will evaporate. While there is little water running through the Nile as much the weed that is possible to be dug up can be done so by heavy machinery. Once all the work is done there is still the matter of getting things back to normal, such as replacing fish electricity from the Aswan Dam would have to be halted meaning electricity would have to come in from elsewhere, probably at a great expense. These developments should solve a great number of problems; the snails could be cleared so the area would have less disease, and the silt that has built up can be used. To stop these silt and snail problems from arising again a large removable mesh could be installed in front of the dam that can be raised out of the water with the silt and snails stuck to it:
Although this may, or may not overcome some major problems it is clear more if its own would arise, like the strength needed in the mesh, and above all the cost, it is unlikely the Soviet Union will fund this project.