A dam built in the 1960s that increased the amount of land under cultivation in Egypt and raised the water table in North Africa.
Although the Aswan High Dam was the product of Egyptian nationalism and Cold War politics, the idea for a large dam in the upper Nile valley first emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. During the early twentieth century, the Greek Egyptian engineer Adrian Daninos lobbied British officials to build a large dam at Aswan to augment smaller dams along the lower Nile that were unable to contain the river’s annual floods. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser first pledged to build a massive dam in the upper Nile valley in the early 1950s. The United States and Great Britain initially offered financial and technical assistance for the project, but both nations eventually withdrew their support in response to Nasser’s growing ties to the communist bloc. Ultimately, the Soviet Union provided almost one-third of the dam’s construction cost, with Egypt funding the remainder from revenues produced after the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Construction began in 1960 and was finally completed in 1971 at a cost of nearly $1 billion. The dam is 11,700 feet in length and 360 feet high, making it one of the world’s largest earthen (rock and clay) embankment dams. Its reservoir, Lake Nasser, is over 300 miles in length and impounds nearly 6 trillion cubic feet of water, enough water to irrigate 7 million acres.
The Aswan High Dam was among the great engineering accomplishments of the twentieth century. Situated on the Nile River, the dam greatly enhanced irrigation and electricity production in Egypt, although it has also adversely affected the fertility of the Nile valley’s soil by altering the river’s annual flooding. Here, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser (second from right), accompanied by members of the Presidential Council, inspects a model of the dam in 1963. (© Topham Picturepoint/The Image Works)
Designed at a time when many economic development theorists equated dam building with nation building, the Aswan High Dam produced both benefits and controversy. Per Nasser’s economic needs, the dam offered Egypt badly needed flood control, irrigation, and hydroelectric power. It provided a final, if imperfect, answer to the Nile River’s irregular and at times catastrophic annual floods. The Nile below the dam became part of a carefully managed irrigation system that enabled Egyptian farmers to produce two to three crops a year instead of one. Additionally, the dam generates more than 10 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, roughly 50 percent of Egypt’s public power production. The dam’s environmental legacy is somewhat murky and is the subject of intense debate among economists, engineers, and foreign assistance specialists. Denied the benefit of the alluvial silt deposited by the Nile’s annual floods, Egyptian agriculture has suffered with more than half of the Nile River valley’s soil now rated as medium or poor. As a consequence, Egypt now imports or manufactures more than a million tons of chemical fertilizer annually. Additionally, the Nile’s reduced flow has accelerated coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion in the Nile Delta, a key area of agricultural productivity. Although the Aswan High Dam remains an impressive feat of engineering, sagging agricultural production, at least in part a consequence of the dam, and a burgeoning population has forced Egypt to become a net importer of foodstuffs.
Robert Rook
See also: Cold War; Egypt; Nile River.
Bibliography
Dorcey, Anthony H.J., ed. Large Dams: Learning from the Past, Looking at the Future. Washington, DC: World Bank, 1997.
McNeill, J.R. Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World. New York: Norton, 2000.