Tag: environment

Don’t drink the water

The US Embassy in Cairo has apparently released the following advisory:

Periodic routine testing by a U.S. military laboratory of “Safi” brand bottled water showed results of elevated radiological readings for alpha and beta particles. Laboratory protocol now requires specific follow-on testing. Although initial testing levels fell within the safety margins of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. military authorities of the Central Command suspended the sale of Safi water through the retail facilities it operates. The American Embassy commissary, which is used by American diplomats and military personnel assigned to Egypt, suspended sales of Safi pending further test results. Based on the EPA standards, we do not believe that the consumption of Safi water has posed a risk. We will report the results of further testing as soon as they are available.

Isn’t Safi bottled by the military?

The coming fight over the Nile

This has been playing out for a few years already, and is worth keeping an eye on. For Egypt, Sudan’s political future is crucial to this issue and is one reason Cairo is so adamantly opposed to the partition of Sudan and to foreign intervention in Darfur. The thing is, this year had the biggest volume of water coming into the Nile in decades (presumably a consequence of climate change), and I’m not sure what the scientific impact of diverting more water upstream would be on Egypt. But no matter what, Egypt will fight tooth and nail to preserve the status quo:

The distribution of Nile River water has been regulated by the 1929 Blue Nile agreement between the United Kingdom and Egypt, and the 1959 agreement between Sudan and Egypt. The latter gave Cairo a de facto right to veto any project using Nile water in other riparian states. Although this treaty remained unchallenged over the years, this is no longer the case. Indeed, many African states have experienced robust G.D.P. growth rates in recent years — with the notable exception of Eritrea, which suffers immensely due to its border war with Ethiopia and its devastating economic policy of self-reliance — and this has increased their need to develop their infrastructure, produce more energy, and provide more water to their populations. Understandably, the majority of the Nile River countries now want to re-negotiate the decades-old treaties.

Considering Egypt’s considerable fall in regional stature over the past few years, it won’t be in a great position to re-negotiate the treaty when the time comes. And while in the past some officials have threatened military action over this issue, I can’t imagine they would really be able to carry them out considering that the other states have a pretty strong case that they would be righting an unfair treaty.

The other migration

A neat story:

TENERIFE, Canary Islands — It rains little on this island. There are no natural rivers, and the air is full of the dry heat of the nearby Sahara.

But in a ravine on the island’s northern tip, tree limbs drip with water and a tropical forest flourishes, sustained almost entirely by condensation from the low-lying clouds that are regularly pinned against the mountainside.

The area, called Cruz del Carmen, is only one example of the unusual evolutionary habitats on the Canary Islands that fascinated Charles Darwin more than 100 years ago, and that today reveal a new species or subspecies to scientists an average of once every six days.

But the unique plant and animal life here is being steadily overtaken by an invasion of foreign species, which have been entering these Spanish islands in increasing numbers since border checkpoints within the European Union were abolished under the Schengen Agreement a decade ago, according to government officials and scientists here.

Usually you hear about the Canary Islands’ human migration problems. Over the last 2-3 years, hundreds of sub-Saharan African migrants have crossed over from southern Morocco to the Islands, were they are usually caught and then released onto the Spanish mainland if their country of origin cannot be identified (they destroy all ID before they get there.) Not only is the trip dangerous and kills many migrants each year, but Spanish and European authorities are naturally concerned about how to stop the migration.

Ironically, animal and plant migrants are potentially much more dangerous to a country’s economy than people are. After all people tend to be productive, and migrants provide much-needed cheap labor. But imagine if a type of sub-Saharan African insect is introduced that turns out to be deadly to Spanish olive trees…

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Parting the Red Sea

This is intriguing:

The scientists from the University of Leeds, one of the largest universities in the UK, say millions of years from now, the pulling apart of the Arabian and Nubian tectonic plates will let waters to rush into and widen the Red Sea. The Leeds scientists have also been able to get an unprecedented picture of the workings of stretching plates, the rock crust moving across Earth’s surface at up to 12 centimeters per year. While the exact course of this continental drift is hard to predict, the movement of the fault promises eventually to widen the Red Sea between Africa and the Arabian peninsula and extend it southwards, cutting a marine inlet inland.

Rift

Tim Wright of the University of Leeds and his international team of colleagues gathered ground and space-based observations of a widening fraction in the Afar Desert of Ethiopia. Between September and October of last year, a 60-kilometer-long stretch of rock spread by as much as eight meters. Magma from adjacent volcanoes filled in the bottom part of the rift, creating new continental crust and a dyke of roughly 2.5 cubic kilometers–twice as much material as erupted from Mount St. Helens–more than two kilometers below the surface. Geologists from the UK believe that they are witnessing a tectonic process similar to the one that formed the Atlantic Ocean, as adjacent plates push apart over millions of years to change the shape of the continents.

Black tide in Beirut

On top of it all, there is now an oil slick on the shores of Beirut:

Beirut Mayor Abdel Monem Ariss, who toured the area, has stated that the source of the diesel oil could either be the heavy traffic of ships and boats that have come to Lebanon to evacuate foreigners, or the Israeli warship that was hit by Hizbullah rockets. The warship might have had to empty an extra load of oil, Ariss said.

Lebanon Eco Disaster
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Via Nur al-Cubicle.

More Golia on land reform

I’ve linked before to Maria Golia’s Daily Star columns, in which she’s currently exploring Egypt’s catastrophic and little-discussed land problems — the way it is administered, what’s being farmed on it, what’s being built on it, and what the government is doing about planning for the future of an ever scarcer resource. In her latest missive she takes another look and land reform, what’s being proposed and what’s (not) being done. Unfortunately, the Daily Star has recently started putting them behind a wall, so it’s reproduced below for your enjoyment. And remember to buy her book on your way out.

The line between famine and abundance is clearly drawn in Egypt, a green vein of Nile-fed land surrounded by lifeless sand. Yet administrative and public denial of land and water shortages is nothing short of suicidal. Given accelerated unplanned growth, only a cathartic reassessment of Egypt’s situation coupled with comprehensive land reform can rescue this uniquely challenged nation from ruin.

Continue reading More Golia on land reform

Support fired activist

Pro-democracy activist Ahmad El Droubi is to take legal action against his company, after he was dismissed for his political activism. Droubi had sent a letter of complaint to his management protesting his unfair dismissal, but as of the moment, WorleyParsons Komex has NOT replied. Droubi has joined the ranks of the ever-growing army of unemployed Egyptians.
Please express your solidarity with pro-democracy activist Droubi, and email the following message to his company directors. Continue reading Support fired activist

Al ard bidoun al fellahin

It’s a few days old, but don’t miss Maria Golia’s latest column for the Daily Star. It’s about one of the most important issues facing Egypt today — an existential one of greater long-term concern than even democratic reform — but one that the government seems to do little about. It’s about land, and how the little area of arable land that Egypt has is being rapidly being transformed from agricultural land into housing or commercial property.

Imagine you have a country, a big one, yours to do with what you please. There’s just one catch. Nearly all the land is desert, which makes the remaining 5 percent the place where 70 million people not only have to live, but farm in order to eat. Around half the people live in towns, and half live in the country. The country half are largely farmers. They constitute 36 percent of the total work force. They work for almost nothing and supply your table with hand-grown foods. Plus, their labor enriches you – they contribute around a quarter of your GDP and exports. So how do you treat the farmers?

Common sense says you encourage them because working the land, as they have for generations, is a noble and profitable pursuit. You might even reward them for accomplishing so much with so little space, water and cash. But not if the country were Egypt. In that case, you would herd the farmers off the land and into jail, raze their villages and give them nothing. Meanwhile you would build on precious agricultural land for fast money.

Read the whole thing for statistics — one of the great thing about Maria’s writing about Egypt is that it’s always shock-full of fascinating stats, as her book Cairo, City of Sand was — and the worrying conclusion: Egypt needs urgent, comprehensive land reform (beyond the limited, and at times disastrous, reform undertaken by Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak) not only to improve the conditions of fellahin but to literally prevent the country from running out of land. I’m always astounded that Egyptian newspaper columnists, who often speak about the need to achieve autarky in food supply (dream on!), urge the government to make farmers grow more wheat but never mention that there is less and less arable land available to grow anything at all. The disconnect between the urban intelligentsia and rural folks could not be wider. The column has a great line on this: “Only abiding shame in their rural past can account for successive administrations’ criminal neglect of Egypt’s countryside.”