UAE President Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan has granted $100 million for Egypt's Toshka water project, AFP said, citing a report published by a government daily on Tuesday.
Water Resources and Irrigation Minister Mahmood Abu Zeid was quoted in Al Akhbar as saying “the grant would cover part of the massive project, which aims at turning large expanses of desert into farmlands.”
According to the minister, the investment in the project has reached so far a sum of $711 million, from a forecast total of $1.2 billion.
Saudi businessman Prince Al Walid bin Talal has poured the lion's share of $500 million into the project, launched in 1997 to create 3.75 million hectares of fertile land in the Tochka desert of southern Egypt.
The five year old project aimed at bringing the Egyptians out of the five percent, the area of the old valley, to live on about 25 percent of the Egyptian area through reclaiming agricultural lands up to 3.4 million feddans by 2017.
Abu Zeid, has said that more than 80 percent of digging works at Sheikh Zayed Canal were completed yearly this year as well as about 53.5 percent of the gigantic pumping station, bearing name of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
The Sheikh Zayed Canal is 310-km-long, 30-m-wide (at bottom level and some 58m at surface level) and 6-m-deep. Phase I of the canal, from inlet up to a distance of 30km, has been already completed. This phase consists of a water-carrying channel.
The main canal has nine branches of different lengths that provide irrigation water to 477,000 feddans, of which 180,000 feddans where double-phase water lifting is required.
The canal's quota of water will be taken from Egypt's fixed quota of the Nile water – Albawaba.com
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