The long shadow of the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement

ABSTRACT Since 2011 Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan have been in continual negotiations over the filling and operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and more fundamentally the future shape of economic development in the Nile basin. This paper examines two important ways that the terms of the 1959 Nile Waters Agreement continue to shape these negotiations. First, the 1959 Agreement codifies Egypt's historic water rights. Egypt's strategy of trying to protect these historic rights by preventing upstream water use in Ethiopia is increasingly putting its ability to maintain and expand its virtual water trade at risk. Thus, counterintuitively, treating its historic water rights as non-negotiable is putting Egypt's food security in jeopardy. Second, the 1959 Agreement created a strong disincentive for Sudan to participate in any new basin-wide water-sharing plan. It is in Sudan's interest to ignore any modest future water withdrawals by Ethiopia rather than join in a third-party negotiation to determine Ethiopia's share. The paper describes how the current impasse on the Nile may be transformed by either new ideas or events.