Egypt to grow new forest on 2K feddans using treated wastewater

CAIRO – 21 May 2024: Chairman of the Aswan Drinking Water and Wastewater Company Abdel Sabour al-Rawy unveiled in a phone-in Tuesday a plan to grow a forest on 2,000 feddans, elaborating that a three-stage wastewater treatment plant would be built to grow hardwood trees and oil plants such as castor.

Rawy added that a private investor had already grown a forest on 5,000 feddans in the governorate, cultivating non-bearing trees, barley, and other kinds of animal feed, using two-stage treated water for irrigation, as reported by Al Watan.

The Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS) released a report in 2017 indicating that the size of Egypt’s imports of wood had recorded 12,300 tons between 2005 and 2015.
 

A master's thesis shows that Egypt has cultivated forests spanning over a total of 21,250 feddans having an estimated wood production of 8.3 million tons when the trees are cut at the age of 15.
 

The study estimates that the country has the capacity to cultivate 328,300 feddans in forests as it produces 3.6 billion cubic meters of treated wastewater annually. Working towards that goal, the government has already allocated 111,7000 feddans for cultivating forests.
 

The thesis is titled “The Production Economics and the Costs of Forests Cultivation in Egypt Using Treated Sewage Water,” and a story was published on it by Al Ahram Agriculture in 2018.