Sudan calls for referring GERD talks to leaders of disputing countries

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Sun, 30 Aug 2020 - 04:23 GMT

BY

Sun, 30 Aug 2020 - 04:23 GMT

CAIRO – 30 August 2020: In a press conference held on Saturday evening, Sudanese Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation Pro. Yasser Abbas called for referring the file of negotiations on the controversial Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam to the leaderships of the three disputing African countries [Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia].
 
Abbas’ call came a day after the three water ministers reached another stalemate on Friday in the negotiations and failed to reach a unified draft that includes every country’s proposal and reservations regarding the operation of the dam the filling process of the reservoir.
 
The three parties were not able to merge the three drafts by the deadline on August 28, 2020, which has been set by the African Union, he said, calling also for giving the international supervisors and the experts more space to have a larger role in the negotiations.
 
Abbas voiced his country’s reservation about the way of negotiations among the three countries, calling for changing it.
 
In a statement issued by the Egyptian Ministry of Irrigation and Water Resources on Friday, Egypt said the three technical and legal committees of every country did not reach consensus on the points of contention regarding the operation of the dam the filling process of the reservoir in the initial draft that included the three parties’ proposals.
 
Egypt added that the draft was not referred yet to the African Union, the main broker of these rounds of negotiations.
 
This round of negotiations, which has started on August 18, 2020, was attended by representatives from the AU, EU, and the USA.
 
Ethiopia started building the controversial Grand Ethiopian dam on the Blue Nile in May 2011, without going back to the downstream countries [Egypt and Sudan]. Since then, Cairo has voiced its concern over how the dam can reduce the country’s annual shares of 55.5 billion cubic meters of Nile water. Egypt’s average water per-capita is expected to drop from 663 cubic meters per year to 582 cubic meters by 2025, according to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) in 2014.
 
Constructions in the Grand Renaissance Dam started on April 2, 2011, at a cost of $4.8 billion. It was built by the Italian construction and engineering company Salini Impergilo. The Italian company is headquartered in Milan. The dam is located on the Nile with a capacity of 74 billion cubic meters and is expected to generate up to 6,000 megawatts of power.
 
In 2015, the three countries signed the Declaration of Principles, per which the downstream countries should not be negatively affected by the construction of the dam. Since then, the talks have been resumed, but In October 2019 blamed Addis Ababa for hindering a final agreement concerning a technical problem, calling for activating the Article No. 10 of the Declaration of Principles, which stipulates that if the three countries could not find a solution to these differences, they have to ask for mediation.
 
The current points of disagreement boil down to the operation of the dam the filling process of the reservoir, and the absence of a legal binding agreement between the three countries on such points, especially after Ethiopia carried out the first phase of the reservoir filling process mid-July 2020 unilaterally.
 

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