Aswan's Impact

"The miracle has been wrought," Gamal Abdel Nasser proudly announced to the people of Egypt after completion of the first stage of the Aswan High Dam. Indeed, the great structure--built with Russian aid and designed to harness the Nile and vitalize the stagnant Egyptian economy--has irrevocably changed the environment of the Nile River Valley and the lives of its inhabitants. But the results have not all been positive, and there is growing debate about whether the economic benefits of Aswan are outweighed by the ecological damage that it has caused.

Critics of the dam point out that it has obstructed the natural flow of silt that enriched the soil of farms along the Nile. Thus it has been necessary to increase the use of imported chemical fertilizers on farms downstream from the dam. Environmentalists also contend that elimination of the silt flow has increased the rate of erosion along the Mediterranean coast adjoining the Nile Delta. In addition, they claim that the absence of the organic matter in the silt in the waters at the river's mouth has deprived sardines and shrimp of an adequate food supply. As a result, Egypt's sardine industry, which used to produce 8,000 tons of the fish annually, has all but disappeared.

The flood control provided by the dam has posed other problems. Residents along the Nile's banks now endure increasing rodent populations that were previously curbed by the cyclical floods. In towns bordering the river, sewage systems that once were regularly flushed out by the flooding and subsequent receding of the river have become badly clogged. The most serious criticism of flood control is that the drainage of more than 1.2 million acres of the nation's rich farm land below the dam is now insufficient Much of that land has become increasingly saline, reducing agricultural productivity by as much as 50%. For all that, the dam has some staunch defenders. They claim that Egypt eventually will not have to import any fertilizer; plants powered by electricity generated at Aswan* will turn out enough to make the country self-sufficient. The loss of the sardine industry, they say, is more than counterbalanced by the new fishing industry on Lake Nasser, which covers 2,000 square miles behind the dam. Fishermen are now taking river bass, Nile catfish and carp from the lake, and government experts estimate that annual catches will eventually rise to as high as 60,000 tons. Coastal erosion, Aswan defenders say, is not so much a product of the loss of silt as it is a result of changing wave patterns in the Mediterranean.

Forever Saved. Egyptian officials concede that inadequate drainage of farm land is a problem, but they say it is a problem they foresaw. Plans to build drainage canals, they say, were sidetracked by the 1967 war with Israel and are only now being revived. More important to agricultural experts is the fact that the dam helped stave off droughts in the exceedingly dry years of 1972 and 1973. "We are forever saved," says William K. Shenouda, Under Secretary of State responsible for the dam, "from the cycle of seven lean years and seven fat years that Joseph encountered in biblical times." A team from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the University of Michigan, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Egyptian Academy of Scientific Research and Technology has begun a $1 million, three-year study that will evaluate Aswan's impact, for better or worse, on Egypt's economy and ecology. The study will probably find no answer for the country's most pressing environmental problem--population growth. In the past 15 years Egypt's population has increased by one-third (to 37 million), and it continues to grow at a rate of one million a year. The demands of that growth have already outstripped the potential capacity of Egypt's big new dam.

* Almost 5 billion kilowatt hours of electricity are being generated annually, still far below the design goal of 10 billion kw-h.

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