newly reclaimed land is not tilled at all and will never be so. There are vari-
ous reasons for this. Often the necessary water for irrigation is lacking. This
is particularly the case at the end of canals if the off-take of water at their
beginning is too great. There are also often problems of management by
the authorities in charge – lack of competence or of interest on the part of
the new landowners who are as a rule not farmers but high-ranking state
officials, war veterans, urbanites who have become rich or Egyptians who
have returned home after working abroad and who consider the acquisition
of land a worthwhile investment.
The extension of permanent irrigation The goal of using the increase in
Nile water to introduce permanent irrigation instead of the basin irrigation
that was still practised in some areas of the Nile valley was achieved. The
natural annual amelioration of the soils, however, which had been considered
the cause of their fertility for thousands of years, does not take place any
more (see Chapter 4).
Drought and flood disaster prevention Since the completion of the Aswan
High Dam Egypt has suffered neither from detrimental Nile floods nor from
crop failure due to low Nile levels. It has been estimated that the harvest
losses during the dry phase of the early 1980s would have been the equiva-
lent of about US$600 million had not water stored by the Sadd el-Ali been