Astronaut Chris Hadfield's Nile, on the left, snaking through the Sahara Desert north through Egypt. Taken from the International Space Station in March 2013. (Chris Hadfield / Canadian Space Agency / Reuters)
Brian Stewart: Egypt's Other Existential Crisis — The Nile -- Brian Stewart, CBC
Ethiopia's construction of a giant hydro dam near the headwaters of the Nile has Egypt's leaders talking military action.
Today's Egyptians are facing two overriding crises that threaten their national well being.
The one that is getting all the world headlines involves the domestic unrest over the now former Islamist government; the other is a foreign threat to alter the flow of the country's essential life force, the Nile River.
For millennia, Egypt, which gets very little rainfall, has been totally dependent on the water and the silt of the Nile to survive and feed a now fast-growing population of 85 million.
So critical is this flow of the Nile that any diminution upstream is seen as a threat to the country's very existence. That's why Cairo has long vowed some form of direct military action, if necessary, to stop Ethiopia building a giant hydroelectric dam along the headwaters of the Nile that flows through its northern highlands.
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My Comment: If the Nile becomes only a trickle of what it once was .... mark my words .... that will be a guarantee for a war that will encompass the entire north-eastern part of Africa.
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