Egypt fines farmers for wasting water as Nile dam crisis drags on - AL-MONITOR: The Middle Eastʼs leading independent news source since 2012

Egyptian farmer Mohamed Omar (C), 65, supplies his farmland with water from a canal, fed by the Nile river, in the village of Baharmis on the outskirts of Egypt's Giza province, northwest of the capital Cairo, on December 1, 2019. - Egypt has for years been suffering from a severe water crisis that is largely blamed on population growth. Mounting anxiety has gripped the already-strained farmers as the completion of Ethiopia's gigantic dam on the Blue Nile, a key tributary of the Nile, draws nearer. Egypt vi

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Egyptian farmer Mohamed Omar (C), 65, supplies his farmland with water from a canal, fed by the Nile river, in the village of Baharmis on the outskirts of Egypt's Giza province, northwest of the capital Cairo, on December 1, 2019. - Egypt has for years been suffering from a severe water crisis that is largely blamed on population growth. Mounting anxiety has gripped the already-strained farmers as the completion of Ethiopia's gigantic dam on the Blue Nile, a key tributary of the Nile, draws nearer. Egypt vi

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Egypt water

Egypt develops ambitious projects to meet growing water needs

Rasha Mahmoud

A photo taken on March 31, 2015 shows the Grand Renaissance Dam under construction near the Sudanese-Ethiopia border. Ethiopia began diverting the Blue Nile in May 2013 to build the 6,000 megawatt dam, which will be Africa's largest when completed in 2017. The leaders of Egypt and Ethiopia promised on March 24 to boost cooperation on the Nile river and turn a page on a long-running row over Addis Ababa's controversial dam project. Egypt, heavily reliant for millennia on the Nile for agriculture and drinking

Panic downriver as Ethiopia's mega dam hits first-year target

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An Egyptian farmer opens up a water irrigation system as he tends to his fields on the banks of the Rasheed river, an offshoot of the Nile, in Cairo's northern Giza province, some 40 kilometres north of the capital, on June 22, 2013.

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An aerial view shows the River Nile before sunset in the Helwan suburb south of the Egyptian capital Cairo on June 20, 2020. (Photo by Khaled DESOUKI / AFP) (Photo by KHALED DESOUKI/AFP via Getty Images)

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