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It looks like a mirage but the lush fields of cauliflowers, apricot trees and melons growing among a vast stretch of sand north of Cairo's pyramids is all too real - proof of Egypt's determination to turn its deserts green.
Tarek el-Kowmey, 45, points proudly to the banana trees he grows on what was once Sahara sand near the Desert Development Centre, north of Cairo, where scientists experiment with high-tech techniques to make Egypt's desert bloom.
"All of this used to be just sand," he said. "Now we can grow anything."
Egypt is trying to create more space for its growing population.
With only 5 per cent of the country habitable, almost all of Egypt's 74 million people live along the Nile River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Already crowded living conditions - Cairo is one of the most densely populated cities on earth - will likely get worse as Egypt's population is expected to double by 2050.
So the Government is keen to encourage people to move to the desert by pressing ahead with an estimated US$70 billion ($91.9 billion) plan to reclaim 1.3 million ha of desert over the next 10 years.
But to make these areas habitable and capable of cultivation, the Government will need to tap into scarce water resources of the Nile, as rainfall is almost non-existent in Egypt.
The plan has raised controversy among some conservationists, who say turning the desert green is neither practical nor sustainable - and might ultimately backfire.
Anders Jagerskog, director of the Stockholm International Water Institute, questions the wisdom of using precious water resources to grow in desert areas unsuited to cultivation.
"A desert is not the best place to grow food," Jagerskog said. "From a political perspective, it makes sense in terms of giving more people jobs even though it is not very rational from a water perspective."
The scope of the reclamations could also add to regional tension over Nile water sharing arrangements.
Egypt's project to reclaim deserts in the south, called "Toshka", would expand Egypt's farmland by about 40 per cent by 2017, using about 5 billion cubic metres of water a year.
That worries neighbours to the south who are already unhappy about Nile water sharing arrangements. Under a 1959 treaty between Egypt and Sudan, Egypt won rights to 55.5 billion cu m per year, more than half of the Nile's total flow.
Ethiopia, where the Blue Nile begins, receives no formal allocation of Nile water, but it is heavily dependent on the water for its own agricultural development in this often famine ravaged country.
"The Toshka project will complicate the challenge of achieving a more equitable allocation of the Nile River with Ethiopia and the other Nile basin countries," said Sandra Postel, director of the US-based Global Water Policy Project. "Egypt may be setting the stage for a scenario that's ultimately detrimental to itself."
But other experts suggest that in the delicate arena of water politics, it may be more of an imperative for Egypt's Government to mollify its own population rather than heed its neighbours' concerns. Overcrowding is straining infrastructure in the cities and the Government is worried that opposition groups such as the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which has a fifth of the seats in Parliament, might capitalise on discontent.
"The Government feels it needs to reduce the number of people in high-density areas, which puts a lot of pressure on resources like fertile land," said Mostafa Saleh, professor of ecology at Al Azhar University in Cairo.
Some critics say that Egypt should look at desert tourism rather than agriculture, which might not be sustainable or particularly profitable and could destroy fragile wildlife habitats that might otherwise be a drawcard for tourists.
A desert reclamation project last decade, south of Cairo, destroyed much of the Wadi Raiyan oasis and its population of slender horned gazelles.
"The price tag on these assets is huge, both as natural heritage and as a resource for tourism," said ecologist Saleh. Saleh is vice-president of an Egyptian firm that built an electricity-free ecolodge, consisting of rock salt and mud houses, amid olive and palm groves in the desert oasis of Siwa.
The lodge, which costs US$400 ($525) per night and has attracted guests such as Britain's Prince Charles and Belgium's Queen Paola, shows that the desert would be better used for ecotourism than farming, he says. At the Desert Development Centre, irrigation water comes through a canal connected to the Nile, about 15km away, where it is used to keep crops flourishing and grass green for hardy hybrid cows to graze.
Experts at the centre believe greening the Sahara might be Egypt's best hope of bringing prosperity to its people. Proximity to markets in Europe and a lack of pests, which usually thrive in humid environments, make desert farming economically viable, said Richard Tutwiler, director of the Desert Development Centre at the American University in Cairo. Water supply, Tutwiler said, shouldn't be an issue at least for the next 10 years.
It makes sense, he says, to expand agriculture onto land that was once useless. "There is no frost and there is sun all the time here. Plants just go nuts."
- Reuters
