Water-food-trade planning: An opportunity for re-framing and addressing the conflicts over the Nile water

Abstract:

Food security is inseparable from water security in the Eastern Nile Basin (ENB) countries of Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia, as agriculture is the major water consumer in the basin. In the ENB, water scarcity, spatial and temporal variability, and sub-optimal management are major problems that lead to persistent food gaps, which are increasingly filled through food imports. The growing concerns over instability and price shocks of the global food market worsen the situation of the ENB countries that have low purchase power. Currently, increasing food production is unilaterally planned through irrigation expansion by reallocation of the scarce Nile water resources, leading to deteriorated food and water security in other basin countries. Conflicts and tensions are on the rise between the basin countries due to several unilateral decisions, including dam building. Therefore, there is a necessity to enhance water-food security planning, which includes improving domestic agricultural production, strategic use of available water resources, intra-basin trade, and global trade in light of possible risks as ways forward to address the ENB water-related conflicts. Cooperation over the utilization of water and land resources of the basin countries through a basin-wide framework is believed to provide better collective water-food nexus security. In this context, we introduce a multi-model approach (MMA) to simulate the ENB countries’ water resources sector, food production sector, including irrigated and rainfed agriculture, and food trade. The MMA is implemented for the historical period (1983-2016), as well as under future hydro-climatic and socioeconomic scenarios up to the year 2050. The underlying vulnerabilities of the water-food nexus state for each of the ENB countries in the historical period are identified, and accordingly, we propose future pathways that qualify as future cooperation policies to enhance water-food nexus security in the basin. Results show that achieving basin-wide food self-sufficiency is possible before 2050, if ENB countries adopt cooperation polices that prioritize closing the crop yield gap; expanding the areas of rainfed agriculture; activating intra-basin food trade; and permitting necessary supplementary irrigation at times and places of need.