Cultivating the Nile New ecologies for the tweNty- first ceNtury Series Editors: Arturo Escobar, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Dianne Rocheleau, Clark University JESSICA BARNES Cultivating the Nile THE EVERYDAY POLITICS OF WATER IN EGYPT Duke University Press Durham and London 2014 © 2014 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-f ree paper ♾ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Quadraat Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-P ublication Data Barnes, Jessica, 1978– Cultivating the Nile : the everyday politics of water in Egypt / Jessica Barnes. pages cm—(New ecologies for the twenty-first century) Includes bibliographical references and index. isBN 978-0-8223-5741-4 (cloth : alk. paper) isBN 978-0-8223-5756-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Water resources development—Egypt. 2. Water-supply— Egypt. 3. Water use—Egypt. 4. Nile river. i. Title. ii. Series: New ecologies for the twenty-first century. hD1699.e3B37 2014 333.9100962—dc23 2014012187 Cover photograph by Jessica Barnes CONTENTS vii Note on Transliteration, Units, and Abbreviations ix Preface xv Acknowledgments chapter 1 The End of a River 1 chapter 2 The Nile’s Nadir: The Production of Scarcity 35 chapter 3 Fluid Governance: Water User Associations and Practices of Participation 72 chapter 4 Irrigating the Desert, Deserting the Irrigated: Land Reclamation at the Margins 106 chapter 5 Flows of Drainage: The Politics of Excess 137 chapter 6 Making Egypt’s Water 169 179 Notes 199 References 223 Index NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION, UNITS, AND ABBREVIATIONS I use a system of transliteration designed to be accessible to readers un- familiar with the Arabic language while recognizable to Arabic speakers. In transliterating written and Egyptian spoken Arabic, I omit the diacriti- cal marks, long vowels, and hamzas (’) that come at the start of words. The Arabic letter ayn I mark with a (‘). I use italics for all Arabic terms except for words that have become standardized for usage in English. I use the following units and abbreviations in the text: bcm Billion cubic meters feddan The unit of area measurement in Egypt. One feddan is made up of 24 qirat and is equivalent to 1.04 acres or 0.42 hectares. I follow the colloquial practice of using the word feddan in its singular form. le Egyptian pound. At the time of fieldwork, in 2007–9, the Egyptian pound was approximately 5le for US$1. mwri The Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, which I also refer to as “the ministry” (al- wizara) or, as farmers do, as “The Irrigation” (al- rai). wua Water user association PREFACE My heart quickens. We have been driving for hours along rutted dirt roads, but now we are on the final stretch of our journey. We park by a sign that welcomes us to Gish Abay and find a guide from the village. We descend a steep, slippery slope of red soil, a crowd of children following behind us. A light rain falls, and black- and- white monkeys scamper out of our way. At the bottom of the hill, a circular green building with a small cross on it signals our destination. The church is considered so holy that you are only able to visit if you have not eaten that day. We have, so we skirt around it and gather by a muddy pool. Water trickles out of the ground through a small opening, surrounded by stone blocks. A few people are collecting water in colored bottles and containers. At the other end of the pool, water flows slowly out into a gully, which winds off to the north, into a flat plain of short yellow grasses. Our guide says, “This is the source of the river, which then flows 6,600km to the sea.” Water seeping out of the ground may not seem all that momentous, but this spring high up in the Ethiopian Highlands marks the beginning of one of the longest rivers in the world: the Nile.1 As I stood by the source of the Nile’s primary tributary—the Blue Nile—one damp day in April 2012, I imagined the large river this small stream becomes. I thought about the channels, dams, pumps, and fields of Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt that it passes through on its long path to the Mediterranean Sea. I pondered the possibilities that the water opens up with its presence, the potentials it oc- cludes in its absence, and the conflicts it generates in the process. Five years earlier when I arrived in Egypt to begin my doctoral fieldwork, I felt a similar sense of excitement as I stood on the 6 October Bridge in