The importance of Egypt’s Nile Delta can’t be overstated. A lush triangle that fans north from Cairo until reaching a 250 kilometer stretch of Mediterranean coast, the delta is home to more than 40 million people. That’s around four in ten Egyptians, or one in ten residents of the entire Arab world. Historically, that demographic heft was matched by economic importance. The fertile land made Egypt an agricultural powerhouse—the birthplace of one of humanity’s first major civilizations. Ancient Egypt, whose pyramids and tombs mesmerize us to this day, didn’t grow out of slaves and sand; it was built, above all, thanks to the soil and toil of the world’s mightiest delta. 

Today, though, the delta occupies a secondary place in Egypt’s national image, which centers on other forms of power: the country’s massive army, the almost boundless megacity of Cairo, and the continent-connecting Suez Canal. Conspicuously, the delta is even absent from Egypt’s agricultural policy. Instead, the country’s leaders promote corporate farming on arid desert land, where agribusinesses irrigate crops for export to Europe and the Gulf. One such project, the so-called New Delta, sits just west of the old one. While the former is lavished with investment and media attention, the real delta is starved of infrastructure and basic services—even as it continues to produce most of Egypt’s food. 

Today, the delta is absent even from Egypt's agricultural policy

To the extent that international discussions take on the delta’s plight, they largely look to the future: What happens to the region’s rapidly growing population when a rising Mediterranean swallows and salinizes ever more of these lowlands? Existential though this question is, it is of little interest to those fighting to eke out a living in the here and now. They have even more urgent concerns, like how to survive without water safe for drinking and irrigation. 

The delta’s plight has momentous implications for the country as a whole. Even as Egypt’s leaders tout high-tech agricultural exports, the country increasingly struggles to feed itself. Its dependence on imported staples—notably wheat, of which Egypt is the world’s largest importer—exposes it to shocks like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or the ongoing devaluation of Egypt’s currency. Ordinary Egyptians, meanwhile, struggle to put food on the table. Growing numbers are forced to compromise not just on luxuries like meat, but also on fresh fruit and vegetables. This crisis entered a new phase in May 2024, when the Egyptian government announced that bread prices would quadruple: shattering a decades-old taboo on charging more for Egypt’s symbolic staple. The delta’s farming communities could be part of the solution to this crisis. But first they must be seen as a resource to invest in, rather than a burden to shun.

Water: A poisoned lifeline

Viewed from outer space, the Nile Delta today looks much as it has for millennia: a bright green wedge between the beige desert and the blue sea, where the world’s longest river completes its journey of some 6,800 kilometers. Since humans first began farming the delta around 5,000 BC, they were blessed by seasonal floods that swept nutrient-rich silts across the flatlands, cleansing and replenishing the earth one century after another. In nearby Mesopotamia, civilizations rose and fell partly due to missteps in managing water and food. Egypt outlived them all, thanks in no small part to this cycle of revitalization.

Look a bit closer, though, and the delta’s topography conveys a half-century of spectacular change. Its green is now pocked all over with grey: cities, towns, and villages, concrete homes linked by asphalt roads. Since 1970, Egypt’s population has exploded from 35 million to more than 110 million—and nowhere more quickly than in the delta. The river’s once overflowing path through the delta now runs corseted down two fixed branches, Rosetta to the west and Damietta to the east. The key to taming the Nile lies almost 1,000 kilometers to the south, where a vast reservoir wells up in the desert. Lake Nasser, named for the iconic president who in 1971 inaugurated the Aswan High Dam, now holds back the floodwaters that once inundated villages, rinsed the earth, and nourished the soil. 

For many in the heart of the delta, however, the river’s freshwater is now little more than a distant memory. “There isn’t enough water anymore,” lamented a young professor in Kafr el-Sheikh governorate, during a tour along canals whose water runs black and reeks of sewage. This sense of scarcity is new and jarring: The river’s abundance runs deep in Egypt’s DNA, so much so that the country is sometimes called the Gift of the Nile. It is also, for most ordinary people, largely unexplained. “I don’t know why,” the professor went on. “Maybe because part of it is diverted in Ethiopia and Sudan.” 

In Kafr el-Sheikh, the Nile's freshwater is a distant memory

Upstream dams are also a preferred explanation for Egypt’s leaders, who eagerly point the finger at forces beyond their control. A second widely cited culprit is runaway growth: Egypt’s population grows by about 2 million per year, with every new citizen drawing on the Nile to drink, wash, cook, survive. A third is the hotter, drier weather that is already increasing demand for decreasing water. All three are part of the picture, but they also obscure the Egyptian state’s role in squandering its most precious resource. 

Indeed, even as the government sounds the alarm on scarcity, it diverts untold volumes of water into projects of dubious benefit to society. One example is the New Administrative Capital being constructed in the desert east of Cairo. Another is the state’s enthusiasm for so-called desert “reclamation” projects, which pump water into intensive agriculture that does little to feed Egyptians themselves. Just look some 100 kilometers west of Lake Nasser, and you’ll see Toshka Lakes, a set of man-made reservoirs where a mix of Egyptian, Emirati, and Saudi companies use diverted Nile water to grow crops for export.

Yet the biggest problem is exactly what kind of water winds its way to the delta, whose downstream position has turned from blessing to curse. Communities that once received abundant, sustaining water now find only leftovers, after upstream communities have taken their fill from the river and given back waste. These dregs are increasingly toxic, carrying effluent from upstream cities, factories, hospitals, and farms that liberally apply chemical fertilizer and pesticides. “In my childhood the irrigation water was good,” reminisced an aging patriarch and father of eight in the countryside of Kafr el-Sheikh. “Today you can’t even use it to wash your hands. One canal close to us collects all the waste from industrial chicken farms. Buffaloes drinking from the canal get sick and die with worms in their belly.”

Humans, too, are said to get sick. “My parents and grandparents suffered from liver diseases due to the water,” said the same patriarch. Two women in the area attributed their kidney problems to water quality; one was forced to have a kidney removed. “Do you smell the water coming out of the pump?” she asked, unnecessarily, given its unmissable stench. “It keeps us from sleeping. Even our poor buffalo don’t like to drink it.” Floating in the storage basins of irrigation water, a thick yellow foam smells even worse than the water itself.

Water and soil are so contaminated that some locals shun their own produce. “People here prefer not to eat their crops because they know what is used to irrigate them,” explained the young professor. “Those of us who can afford to do so buy crops from a town 27 kilometers away.” At best, the trip entails a long journey by car along mostly unpaved roads; at worst, it means a tiresome expedition by minibus, often with multiple connections along the way. In this impoverished region, the worse-off eat food that they know poisons them as much as it keeps them alive. The aging patriarch in Kafr el-Sheikh reflected on the grim evolution during his lifetime:

Personally, I sell my crops to make money and buy my own food from other governorates. I’m sad that I have to do that, and don’t like the idea that anyone else will be harmed by my crops. I also feel bad when I see my grandkids eating subsidized pasta, when I own land from which they could eat rice. But there’s nothing I can do. If I stopped farming, how could I live?

Food: Salting the earth

Rampant pollution feeds another problem: salinization. While chemicals besiege the delta from upstream, saltwater creeps in from the Mediterranean. Salt even comes up from below, as rising seas infiltrate coastal groundwater. This is happening, for instance, in Beheira, in the western delta, which is still known as Egypt’s most productive agricultural region. Around an aging farmer’s guava orchard, the groundwater is so salty—and so close to the surface—that neighbors have dug pits from which they harvest table salt.

To make matters worse, much of the delta’s farmland lacks proper drainage infrastructure, leaving fields to stew in hyper-saline waste. The technical concept of “salinity” encompasses all sorts of minerals that blend into water: The more “dissolved solids” the latter contains, the more saline it is said to be, and the less suitable it becomes for agriculture and other uses. Evaporation increases salinity by concentrating salts in what water remains. Salt is inscribed upon much of the delta’s land: In the crust that spreads atop soil, and in the shriveled crops that sprout from it. In Egypt’s hot climate, irrigated fields require careful drainage to rinse out the salts that otherwise accumulate. The aging farmer summed it up: “All our problems come from poor drainage.”

The delta’s decline is all the more jarring for the fact that it remains, on the surface, a place of relative abundance. Luxuriant vegetation quickly overgrows the garbage strewn among it. Experienced farmers grow a wide variety of crops that are staples for the delta’s residents: rice, wheat, fava beans, seasonal vegetables and fruit. This locally rooted, diversified agriculture is what many of us think of when we discuss sustainable food systems—by stark contrast with the export-oriented monocultures being promoted elsewhere in Egypt, and globally. Increasingly, though, this picture of fertility is a mirage. To keep growing on increasingly degraded, saline soil, farmers have no choice but to pile on ever more chemicals—which in turn further increases salinity. An agricultural laborer in Kafr el-Sheikh lamented: “We must use a lot of fertilizer, or the harvest decreases.”

This vicious cycle is increasingly widespread, not just in Egypt but across the globe. The delta’s farmers, however, have it worse than most: They contend not only with poisoned soil and water, but also with grinding poverty and tiny plots of land. Most cannot afford to fallow fields or invest in infrastructure like subsurface drainage, both of which would preserve their soil. Instead, they plow onward with practices they know will hurt them in the long run, with little or no support for changing course.

People: Sacrificed communities

“No one thinks about us,” said the laborer in Kafr el-Sheikh, standing by a ditch clogged with water hyacinths—a plant so invasive that some locals call it “water cancer.” “Politicians come and promise us things and then leave. There are no NGOs, no charities, no one to help us but God.” This sense of abandonment echoes across the delta’s farms: “We see nothing of the government,” said a middle-aged farmer in Beheira. “They sit in their offices from 10am to 1pm and that’s it.”

To some, the state is worse than absent; it actively makes life harder, by levying fees even as it fails to provide basic services. In Kafr el-Sheikh, the woman who struggles to sleep because of the water’s stench noted that the government fines her family for dumping wastewater in the nearby canal. These fines are both unaffordable and unavoidable, given that the state refuses to connect her unlicensed home to the grid. Equally unhelpful are the local cooperatives and agricultural banks, which are widely regarded as corrupt. One farmer accused the head of a nearby cooperative of selling subsidized fertilizers to farmers at an inflated price and pocketing the difference.

“No one thinks about us. No one to help us but God.”

The feeling of neglect is amplified by memories of a time when the state played a far greater role in supporting the country’s farmers. In the mid-1960s, at the height of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s state-building drive, agriculture and irrigation accounted for 23 percent of public investments. In Egypt, as in other modernizing Arab states like Syria and Iraq, a nationalist government invested massively in uplifting the peasantry: redistributing land, expanding irrigation, and doling out technical and material aid. 

This generous support system, however, was short-lived. From the late 1960s through early 1970s, Egypt’s economic growth slowed and public debt ballooned—thanks in part to the disastrous 1967 Arab-Israeli war and subsequent closure of the Suez Canal. Egypt sought aid from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which in exchange pressed Cairo to slash subsidies. When in 1977 President Anwar Sadat announced painful cuts to support for flour, cooking oil, and other staples, deadly riots erupted. 

Although the flareup prompted Cairo to back off the most incendiary cuts, the overall trend toward IMF-mandated liberalization continued. State investment in agriculture fell from its high of 23 percent in the mid-1960s to eight percent in the mid-1970s and four percent today. Liberalization, combined with tax hikes and the ongoing devaluation of the Egyptian pound, has sent the costs of pesticides and fertilizers rocketing. 

Collapsing state budgets afflict not only farmers but also the local officials tasked with supporting them. “The last time I received a research grant from the government was in the 1990s,” said a 73-year-old engineer, sitting at his empty desk in an agricultural research center outside the Nile Delta’s largest city, Alexandria. In the facility, paint peels off the walls, bare wires poke out of electrical sockets, and dust covers aging books. Computers are nowhere to be seen. Like most of his colleagues—frail, white-haired men with stooped shoulders—he retired years ago, and was never replaced. He still comes to the facility to do research at his own expense. “Today we depend on private sources of funding. For projects that I’m personally interested in, I cover the cost myself.”

"Last time I received a research grant was in the 1990s"

Such individual initiative is as touching as it is incapable of filling the gaps left by retreating state support. Farmers, too, show plenty of grit and solidarity, but it only gets them so far. In one poignant example, a community in Kafr el-Sheikh pooled money to buy a plot of land on which the state could build a much-needed water treatment plant. “The land has been ready for more than seven years,” said the young professor. “But the government never followed up, and there’s no other money to build it.” While impoverished communities lobby the state for their right to clean water, in 2023 the so-called New Delta project boasted the world’s largest water treatment plant. 

Adding insult to injury, many farmers feel not just abandoned but belittled. “If we ask the state for help,” said the aging patriarch in Kafr el-Sheikh, “they tell us: ‘This is your land and this is its condition.’ What they mean is that we should stop complaining. And, if we don’t like our situation, we should leave.” Indeed, there seems to be little place for such smallholders in the state’s vision of agriculture. Far from the black, chemical-laced waters of Kafr el-Sheikh, officials in Cairo spend money on English-language content pitching Egypt’s leadership in “precision agriculture” and food-related “e-commerce.” That neatly sums up the state of Egyptian agriculture: There’s no shortage of water and capital for big companies seeking to grow export crops in the desert. But the smallholders upon whom ordinary Egyptians rely are increasingly out of sight, out of mind, and out of luck.

* * *

To an outsider, Egypt’s sheer size can be dizzying. The vast expanses of desert and delta are matched by a capital city whose buildings, billboards, and highways endlessly eat up the land around it. The country’s economic predicament is equally overwhelming. Its foreign debt quadrupled between 2015 and 2023, making it the IMF’s second largest borrower. This rocketing debt burden strains its ability to import food, like the wheat for which it is so hungry. Egypt’s authorities add to the vertigo with a slew of projects driven by arcane superlatives: Africa’s highest tower, the world’s longest manmade river, and so on.

Beneath all the enormity, though, the story of Egypt’s food security crisis is painfully intimate. The people who long fed the country now struggle to feed themselves. The rest of the country depends ever more on imports that the country cannot afford, and whose availability is vulnerable to all manner of shocks: wars, pandemics, currency crashes, and beyond. If all that sounds familiar, it is because these same structural problems are widespread across the region, and indeed the world. Countries as diverse as Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Syria confront much the same predicament. Wealthy, industrialized nations have more resources at their disposal, but they too have increasingly forsaken their own agricultural working classes in favor of economic systems based on extreme privatization and globalization.

Beneath all the enormity, Egypt's food crisis is painfully intimate

Those international currents don’t just mirror Egypt’s crisis: They helped create it. The decline of state support for small farmers stems partly from Western donors’ fervor for privatization. The rise of export-oriented cash crops, at the expense of local food supply, owes much to the appetites of wealthy consumers in Europe and the Gulf—and to their governments’ efforts to capitalize on Egypt’s land and water via lopsided trade deals and predatory land grabs. The irony is that these same rich nations, which obsess about migration, have a vested interest in slowing Egypt’s rush toward economic and environmental disaster. The country, after all, is so big that its stability matters far beyond its own borders. 

Just as the Nile Delta long ago helped humanity learn to farm, today it risks teaching us another, equally momentous lesson about the consequences of taking the fertile soil and its farmers for granted. What happens when tens of millions of people are written off as disposable, even as their society continues to depend on them? How will everyone eat? And where are the hungry to go?

29 July 2024

Lyse Mauvais is an environmental journalist. Nada Arafat is a journalist with Mada Masr. Alex Simon is Synaps' co-founder and environment program director.

Methodology and sources

This essay reflects fieldwork conducted in Kafr el-Sheikh, Buheira, and Cairo in spring 2024. It is part of a collaboration between Synaps and Mada Masr, who will soon publish their own story based on the same fieldwork.

It also draws on in-depth research published elsewhere, not least by Mada Masr itself. Below is a partial list of sources that informed each section, and which provide a wealth of additional detail.

Introduction

Nada Arafat, “How did salad disappear from Egyptian tables?” Mada Masr, 13 March 2024.

Saker El Nour, “Agricultural and food policies in Egypt between 2014 and 2021,” Arab Reform Initiative, 5 January 2023.

Water: A poisoned lifeline

Nada Arafat and Saker El Nour, "How Egypt’s water feeds the Gulf," Mada Masr, 15 May 2019.

Jessica Barnes, Cultivating the Nile: The Everyday Politics of Water in Egypt, Duke University Press, 2014.

David Sims, Egypt’s desert dreams: Development or disaster? AUC Press, 2015.

Henk Zengstra, “Lake Burullus: Local food security and biodiversity under pressure” (pdf), Center for Development and Innovation, December 2013.

People: Sacrificed communities

Egypt Ministry of International Cooperation, “Egypt’s sustainable agricultural transformation leverages cutting-edge technology,” Bloomberg (sponsored content).

Ahmed El Miniawy and Ahmed Goueli, “Food and agricultural policies in Egypt,” CIHEAM, 1994.

Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, “Egypt, the IMF and three subsidy approaches” (pdf), 2023.

Conclusion

Patrick Werr, “Egypt faces external debt reckoning after borrowing spree,” Reuters, 6 June 2023.

Illustration credits: Ancient Egyptian art via The Met Fifth Avenue. Photographs by Lyse Mauvais, in Kafr el-Sheikh. Satellite image via Google Earth.