Ethiopia’s Renaissance Dam: A Last Chance for Diplomacy

Jun 1, 2020 | Yaseen Mohmad Abdalla
View Original

The dispute between Egypt and Sudan on the one side, and Ethiopia on the other, about filling and operating the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) seems to have reached an impasse with Ethiopia’s insistence on beginning to fill the dam in July, with or without the consent of the other parties.

On May 6, the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Sameh Shoukry, wrote to the UN Security Council asking it to call on Ethiopia to return to the negotiating table and to respect its international obligations.

A few weeks earlier, on April 10, the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, and the Sudanese Prime Minister, Abdallah Hamdok, received a letter from the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Abi Ahmed, requesting them to agree to the first phase of filling the GERD reservoir. This would require 4.9 billion cubic meters of water in the first year, and 13.5 in the second, a total of 18.4m3 billion. Both recipients rejected the Ethiopian plan.