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Egypt’s Ministry of Irrigation and Water Resources announced in a statement on Friday that negotiations on the Great Renaissance Ethiopian Dam (GERD) have stalled once again due to continued disagreements between Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan on legal and technical points. regarding the proposal to be presented to the African Union.
A meeting Friday between the water ministers of the three countries did not result in a unified draft proposal ready to be presented to the African Union office, led by South Africa.
The meeting was held under the auspices of the African Union and in the presence of observers from member states of the AU Office, the United States, the EU, and experts from the AU Commission.
After a lengthy debate on the negotiations in the near future, the statement explained that the ministers agreed at the end of the meeting that each country would send a letter to South Africa regarding their vision of what the next stage of the negotiations should be.
Sudan’s Irrigation Minister Yasser Abbas said efforts to combine the three countries’ proposals into a single draft agreement have gone nowhere.
Abbas added that during the session, experts from each country presented a report on the committee’s work carried out in an attempt to develop a combined draft unified agreement from the proposals submitted by each of the three countries.
“After a careful evaluation of the development of the negotiations and reviewing the work of the expert teams during the last days, it was clear that the process of merging the three drafts had stalled,” he explained.
A Sudanese delegation stressed that negotiations are the only way to reach an agreement, with Sudan ready to resume negotiations at any time after communicating with the AU presidency.
The second round of GERD negotiations began on July 27 under the auspices of the AU and in the presence of observers from the United States and the European Union, and experts from the African Union Commission.
Its objective is to reach a binding agreement on the filling and operation of the dam. The meetings are based on the results of a presidential summit of the African Union held on July 21.
Egypt and Ethiopia have been in multiple rounds of negotiations over the dam over the past nine years, all of which have failed to reach a final agreement. Egypt blames Ethiopia for the failure of the negotiations.
Egypt, which relies heavily on fresh water from the Nile, has expressed fear that GERD will adversely affect the country’s water supply, especially in light of fears of overcrowding, and has insisted that measures be taken to protect the downstream countries in case of drought. during the process of filling the dam.
Ethiopia, for its part, has highlighted the importance of the project to boost its economy, where more than half of the population currently lives without access to electricity.
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