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CHAPTER IY. 
Projects. 
31. Projects. — No account of the Nile in 1904 would be complete 
without an enumeration and slight examination of the projects before 
the public for the provision of sufficient water to the Nile in times of 
low supply to insure the perennial irrigation of the whole of Egypt ; 
to utilise these perennial waters by converting basin tracts into peren- 
nially irrrigated ones ; to protect the country from the dangers accom- 
panying high floods; and to permit of the reclamation of the low salted 
lands of Lower Egypt which border the Mediterranean sea. 
Egypt has a total irrigable area of 6J millions acres. Of this area, J 
of a million acres, which are to-day inundated in flood and lie along 
the edge of the deserts, must continue to be inundated in flood for 
all time, to prevent the sands of the desert from spreading over the 
Nile Valley. Their value is £5,000,000. Four million acres are peren- 
nially irrigated. They have a mean value of £55 per acre, and have 
a total value of £220,000,000. Of the remaining two million acres, 
two-thirds are irrigated only in flood and one-third is not irrigated 
at all. These 2 million acres have a mean value of £25 per acre, and 
are worth £50,000,000. The land of Egypt may be considered as 
worth £275,000,000 to-day. If it were possible to perennially irrigate 
the 2 million acres which are without such irrigation, their value would 
be increased by £30 per acre, or by £60,000,000. 
The problem before us is how to provide perennial irrigation to 
these 2 million acres and so add £60,000,000 to the wealth of the 
country. 
It has been calculated that each milliard of cubic metres of water 
stored in reservoirs situated in Egypt itself is sufficient to insure the 
conversion of half a million acres from flood to perennial irrigation. 
Egypt therefore requires reservoirs capable of storing 4 milliards of 
cubic metres of water. 
In Mehemet Ali’s time, the great preoccupation of the Government 
was the pressing on of the cultivation of cotton, and as this crop 
needed perennial irrigation, the securing of an abundant supply of 
water all the year round was the problem of the day. 
