By Walaa Hussein | From Al Monitor

Amid Egypt’s water scarcity, which threatens to worsen the country’s food shortage, Cairo is working to form agricultural alliances outside its borders. The efforts — which have been in place as limited experiments since the 1980s under Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak — include sending Egyptian farmers to cultivate land in Sudan and Congo, transfer their expertise to those countries and take advantage of the available water to cover the food needs of the Egyptian people. The efforts also aim at establishing model farms for strategic crops in a number of countries, including Mali, Niger and Zambia.

The countries covered by the Egyptian project for foreign agriculture have an abundance and diversity of water sources, but declining agricultural development due to lack of funding and agricultural machinery. In Sudan, which has a surface area of ​​1.8 million square kilometers (445 million acres), cultivated areas do not exceed 45 million acres, according to the latest statistics by the Central Bank of Sudan. That is about a fifth of the country’s arable area, estimated at 200 million acres.

The ​​surface area of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the second-largest African country, is 2.35 million square kilometers (581 million acres). The country has ​​1.3 million square kilometers (321 million acres) of forest areas. Several rivers — such as the Nile and the Congo rivers — supply the Congo with a lot of water and the country’s arable land is of excellent quality. Nevertheless, 95% of the country’s population suffers from hunger.

At the Arab Summit in March, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir put forth an initiative for Arab food security to have the troubled Egyptian program cultivate thousands of acres in Sudan.

In April, the Sudanese government announced the allocation of Sudanese land in several water-rich areas where the Egyptians can implement joint projects in food security and by using the agricultural integration program. The latter aims to achieve self-sufficiency when it comes to agricultural and food production. The program was announced in a meeting in Khartoum on April 24, in the presence of five ministers concerned with agriculture and irrigation issues from the two countries.

Read more at Al Monitor