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CAIRO, Nov. 4 (Xinhua) – The water ministers of Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan failed to agree on a methodology on Wednesday to complete their negotiations on Ethiopia’s gigantic Nile River dam in the next stage, the said Egyptian Water Ministry in a statement. .
The three ministers held a virtual meeting earlier in the day to discuss the optimal framework to manage the ongoing negotiations on the Great Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which are being conducted under the auspices of the African Union (AU). .
“It turned out during the discussions that the three countries do not agree on the methodology to complete the negotiations in the next stage,” Egypt’s Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation said.
The three countries agreed that each will submit a report to South Africa, the current AU president, on the details of their meetings, according to the statement.
The reports will also include their views on ways to implement the results of two previous summit meetings of the AU Office in June and July, which established that the three countries would conclude a binding legal agreement on the rules for filling out and operating the GERD.
Ethiopia, a country upstream from the Nile basin, began building the GERD in 2011, raising concerns from Egypt that it could affect the annual share of 55.5 billion cubic meters of Nile water in the country. Sudan, Egypt’s downstream neighbor, has recently raised similar concerns about the $ 4 billion dam.
In recent years, tripartite talks on the GERD’s filling and operating rules, whose total reservoir capacity is 74 billion cubic meters, have been unsuccessful, including those negotiated by Washington and recently by the AU. Final product
