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Egypt plans to raise crops in sub-Saharan Africa

Egypt plans to agriculturally integrate with a number of water-rich countries in Africa to address the worsening food shortages in Egypt and the country’s inability to increase the size of agricultural land because of a lack of water.
A girl farms the land during the rainy season outside Gereida (South Darfur), July 25, 2012. According to UNAMID, women, children and the elderly living in camps, in the government forces controlled Gereida, usually farm surrounding lands while men work in further areas in order to avoid robberies, rapes and other perpetrations. UNAMID added that in May, the rebel movement occupied Gereida for 24 hours after a big clash that destroyed telecommunication facilities and several buildings. UNAMID has deployed a
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CAIRO — Amid Egypt’s water scarcity, which threatens to worsen the country’s food shortage, Cairo is working to form agricultural alliances outside its borders. The efforts — which have been in place as limited experiments since the 1980s under Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak — include sending Egyptian farmers to cultivate land in Sudan and Congo, transfer their expertise to those countries and take advantage of the available water to cover the food needs of the Egyptian people. The efforts also aim at establishing model farms for strategic crops in a number of countries, including Mali, Niger and Zambia.

The countries covered by the Egyptian project for foreign agriculture have an abundance and diversity of water sources, but declining agricultural development due to lack of funding and agricultural machinery. In Sudan, which has a surface area of ​​1.8 million square kilometers (445 million acres), cultivated areas do not exceed 45 million acres, according to the latest statistics by the Central Bank of Sudan. That is about a fifth of the country’s arable area, estimated at 200 million acres.

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