Correspondents' Correspondence The Big Canal
LAND, THOMAS
Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS The Big Canal Paris??Although it has attracted...
...An Egyptian expert adds: "Climatic criticisms have been shown to be trivial, based as they were on an earlier plan arising from a 1954 Anglo-Egyptian survey that involved a waterway twice the size of the one now under construction and the drainage of millions of acres of swamp for agriculture...
...Other experiments by the UN agency are to deal with agriculture, fisheries and livestock...
...Correspondents' Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS The Big Canal Paris??Although it has attracted relatively little attention given current political developments in the Middle East, Egypt and Sudan are now building the world's largest navigable canal...
...If nothing very serious is turned up, the Jonglai canal should be completed by 1985 ??Thomas Land...
...They note that the rainfall over Eastern Africa is controlled by air from the Southeast Atlantic...
...Plans for intensive farming in the area have been dropped, and special crossing places are to be built where cattle can swim the canal...
...Climatologists, too, tend to dismiss the environmentalist worries about the long-term effects of the waterway...
...This fact is of overriding importance, since all the water now being stored in the Aswan Dam is being used...
...Research into how the Jonglai will affect the area is being carried out under the auspices of the United Nations' Development Program, with financial assistance from several European countries as well as the European Development Fund...
...Further, they point out that Lake Nasser, on the border between Egypt and the Sudan, has caused the evaporation of millions of gallons of water during recent years without in any way affecting the rainfall of the region...
...A Sudanese representative at the conference, for instance, dismissed the document as "crocodile tears by children unconcerned about the people living in a stone age env ironment...
...Intended to create a breadbasket for the Arab world, the waterway is being dug by the Companie de Constructions Internationales' 2,000 ton excavator...
...Yet for all the benefits the scheme is likely to provide, its wisdom has been seriously questioned by a host of environmentalists...
...By 1982," notes the Sudanese expert, "there will be no water for irrigation??that is why we must dig...
...also the world's largest??at the northern edge of the Sudd marshes...
...Care is also being taken to avoid any serious disruption of the lives of the local nomads...
...When completed, the Jonglai Canal will be approximately 170 feet wide, 15 feet deep and 173 miles long...
...The Arab planners of the project have bitterly attacked the study...
...By taking the river water past the world's largest swamp, he says, the canal will save an estimated 4,000 million cubic meters of water a year??to be shared equally between Egypt and the Sudan...
...Considerable financial backing for the project is also expected from the Arab authority for Agricultural Investment and Development...
...Some of their doubts were voiced in a report compiled by Oscar Mann, a former volunteer worker in the Sudan, for the Environmental Liaison Committee, a privately funded international watchdog group...
...Presented to delegates attending a recent world conference on deserts in Nairobi, the report argues that the canal might cause a drop in the rainfall over the whole of Eastern Africa, bring waterweeds northwards and clog the White Nile, introduce new diseases into the area, rob the native peoples of their traditional fishing grounds, and impede the passage of the nomads and their herds...
...The current project is to involve the development of only about 700,000 acres for arable use??and there are no fears that the Sudd, with its immense annual rainfall, could ever become a desert...
...It will carry a quarter of the flow of the White Nile and in the process drain the marshes, improve the vital transport link between Juba and Khartoum, and insure an adequate supply of water to meet the long-term agricultural and industrial needs of the two nations shouldering the bulk of the close to $300 million cost...
...A mathematical model of the Nile water system and natural resource surveys on swamp ecology, range ecology and soil and wildlife, have so far been constructed...
...Perhaps the best argument for the Jonglai has come from a Sudanese specialist...
Vol. 62 • January 1979 • No. 2
