#ethiopia mega projects

[kimludcom]

Dubai of Africa? Africa's Rising Giant? Ethiopia's $ Billions MEGA Projects Will SHOCK You!

[afrotumble]

Everything you need to Know About The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam

[dailyanarchistposts]

Mega Schemes

Huge hydraulic schemes are made possible by advanced modern civil engineering techniques. They require vast international contracts that are only possible at the level of central governments, international free floating capital and supranational government organisations. The financiers borrow money and lend it at commercial rates, so they favour largescale engineering projects that promise increasing production for export markets at the expense of local subsistence economies, with disastrous social and environmental effects. Cash crops destroy settled communities and cause pollution of soil and water. For instance, Ethiopia’s Third Five-Year Plan brought 60% of cultivated land in the fertile Awash Valley under cotton, evicting Afar pastoralists onto fragile uplands which accelerated deforestation and contributed to the country’s ecological crisis and famine. There’s a vicious circle at work. Development needs money. Loans can only be repaid through cash crops that earn foreign currency. These need lots more water than subsistence farming. Large hydraulic schemes to provide this water are development. Development needs money. And so it goes.

Large-scale projects everywhere are the consequence and justification for authoritarian government: one of America’s great dam-building organisations is the US Army Corps of Engineering. Stalin’s secret police supervised the construction of dams and canals. Soldiers such as Nasser of Egypt and Gadafi of Libya and military regimes in South America have been prominent in promoting such projects. Nasser built the Anwar High dam in 1971. The long-term consequences have been to stop the annual flow of silt onto delta land, requiring a growing use of expensive chemical fertilisers, and increased vulnerability to erosion from the Mediterranean. Formerly the annual flooding washed away the build-up of natural salts; now they increase the salt content of irrigated land. The buildup of silt behind the dam is reducing its electricity generating capacity; the lake is also responsible for the dramatic increase in water-borne diseases. Nationalism leads to hydraulic projects without thought to what happens downstream in other countries. The 1992 floods of the Ganga-Brahmaputra-Barak system killed 10,000 people. 500m people live in the region, nearly 10% of the world’s population, and they are constantly at risk from water exploitation and mismanagement. Technological imperialism has replaced the empire building of the past: large-scale hydro projects are exported to countries despite many inter-related problems – deforestation, intensive land use and disputes and so on. Large-scale water engineering projects foment international disputes and have become economic bargaining counters, for example the Pergau dam in Malaysia. The British Government agreed to spend £234m on it in 1989 in exchange for a £1.3bn arms deal. In 1994 the High Court ruled that the aid decision was unlawful but these kinds of corrupt deals continue.

In Sri Lanka the disruption caused by the Mahawelli dams and plantation projects resulted in the forcible eviction of 1 million people and helped maintain the insurgency of the Tamil Tigers that resulted in thousands of deaths as they fought government forces from the late 1980s onwards. In 1993 the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq were threatened by Saddam Hussein’s plans to drain the area – the most heavily populated part of the region. Many of the 100,000 inhabitants fled after being warned that any opposition risked death. Selincourt estimated that 3 million people would lose their homes, livelihoods, land and cultural identity by giant dam projects in the 1990s. The Kedung Ombo dam (Indonesia) displaced 25,000; the Akasombo dam (Ghana) 80,000; Caborra Bassa (South Africa) 25,000. Three dams in Laos alone will have displaced 142,000 people. The proposed Xiao Langdi dam in China would displace 140,000; the Three Gorges project 1.1 million people. Only war inflicts a similar level of human and environmental destruction, yet large dam projects have a chronic record in delivering water and power, or eliminating flooding in downstream valleys.

[mariacallous]

As France grapples with soaring temperatures and ever more ruinous droughts, a full-blown water war is unfolding in the country, with heavy clashes, injuries, and arrests.

Tensions are running high over the use of giant artificial reservoirs for irrigation, which some farmers rely on to cope with water scarcity but which critics say are making the problem worse, accelerating the depletion of limited groundwater resources for the benefit of only a handful of big producers.

It’s one of many conflicts over water access breaking out with growing frequency all over the world, as climate change dries soils, increases temperatures and makes crops thirstier, and reduces the annual snowpacks that traditionally replenished freshwater flows. Water diversion in China is stoking regional ire. In Central Asia, access to scarce water resources is exacerbating cross-border tensions. Climate change and upstream dams, as well as poor water management, are drying out Iraq and Iran. Egypt and Ethiopia have been at odds for years over an upstream Nile River dam that threatens downstream countries. Western U.S. states are bickering over the dwindling resources of the once-mighty Colorado River, while in Germany and Chile, contentious access to water is fueling domestic strife.

“Water is a common good. No one can claim it as their own,” said Julien Le Guet, a spokesperson for Bassines Non Merci (Basins No Thanks), an activist group. This month, Le Guet and several other defendants went on trial over various unauthorized demonstrations against the construction of a new mega-reservoir in Sainte-Soline, in western France.

A rally held in March, in particular, turned into a violent confrontation with the police that left 47 officers and 200 demonstrators wounded. Some local farmers also denounced damage to their crops and the pipes linking their fields to the new basin. Fresh protests took place at another construction site nearby and in Paris over the last few weeks, with more actions planned in the near future.

Estimates vary between 100 and several hundred retention basins in France, giant plastic-lined craters spanning 20 acres on average that are filled by pumping groundwater in winter for use during the scalding summer months. And their number, whatever it is, is growing. The project in the Deux-Sèvres region (which includes Sainte-Soline), led by a private cooperative of local farmers, entails the construction of 16 new reservoirs that would store more than 6 million cubic meters of water—the equivalent of 1,600 Olympic swimming pools. Another 30 reservoirs are due to be built in the nearby Vienne region.

Supporters say that as the weather gets hotter and drier—2023 had the hottest summer on record globally—the basins are an indispensable life insurance for farmers and a way to reduce the pressure on water resources when they are at their lowest. France has recently been experiencing its worst droughts ever; in July, more than two-thirds of its natural groundwater reserves were below normal levels.

“Irrigating without basins means to continue pumping groundwater, even when there’s less of it,” said Laurent Devaux of Coordination Rurale, a farmers’ union.

The problem, critics say, is that the reservoirs are siphoning precious groundwater for the benefit of a small minority. Just 7 percent of French farmland is equipped with irrigation canals, and only some of the irrigated farms around the reservoirs are actually connected to them. The basin in Sainte-Soline will be directly linked to barely 12 farms out of a total of 185 in the area. According to Le Guet, of all the irrigated farms in the region concerned by the Deux-Sèvres project, the ones that will be connected to the new basins use twice as much water on average as the others.

“This is not just a conflict between certain farmers and environmentalist groups,” said Laurence Marandola, a spokesperson for the Confédération Paysanne farmers’ union, which opposes the basins. “All of us farmers need water,” she said.

And there is less and less of it. Due to the combined effects of global warming and over-pumping, Europe’s groundwater resources have been steadily declining in recent decades, with a yearly loss of some 84 gigatons of water (roughly the equivalent of Lake Ontario) since the turn of the century—just like what’s happening elsewhere in the world, from much of the U.S. to the Middle East.

Critics, including conservationists, small farmers, and scientists, slam the reservoirs as a particularly wasteful method of storing water. Keeping it out in the open, rather than underground, means that some of it evaporates and the remaining part heats up, filling with toxic bacteria, said Christian Amblard, an honorary research director at France’s National Center for Scientific Research. “You’ve got, at the same time, a loss of quantity and quality. It makes no sense,” he said.

Finally, these reservoirs are accused of perpetuating what critics call an unsustainable agricultural model that consumes too much water and accelerates global warming. More than 60 percent of Europe’s arable land is used to feed livestock—which, globally, is responsible for over 30 percent of the world’s emissions of methane—a powerful greenhouse gas. The crops that are grown for animal feed include corn, which occupies one-third of all irrigated land in France and demands lots of water in the summer—hence the need for solutions such as the reservoirs.

“The mega-basins are delaying a transition to a responsible, resilient, and water-efficient agriculture,” Amblard said.

That transition would entail, among other things, working to make soils more capable of retaining water and pivoting away from meat and dairy production, according to experts. With up to 15 billion euros in public aid doled out to the French agriculture sector every year, the necessary financial resources shouldn’t be hard to find, Amblard said. “The agricultural sector is one of the few where the ecological transition can be carried out without leaving anyone by the wayside,” he said.

So far, though, successive French governments have shown little appetite for that, handsomely subsidizing the reservoirs instead—which current French Agriculture Minister Marc Fesneau praised as “virtuous.” Taxpayers will foot 70 percent of the 76-million-euro bill for the ones planned in the Deux-Sèvres. If farmers have an outsized political and financial influence in the European Union as a whole, in France they are a political power unto themselves.

French authorities have also been cracking down hard on the anti-basins movement. Police have come under heavy criticism for their handling of the Sainte-Soline protest, with the Human Rights League, a French nongovernmental organization, denouncing the indiscriminate firing of rubber bullets and the hindering of first-aid workers by the security forces in a bid to “prevent access to the basin’s site, whatever the human cost.”

French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin has described some of those taking part in the protests as “eco-terrorists” and has taken steps to dissolve Les Soulèvements de la Terre (Earth’s Uprisings), a vocal, and sometimes violent, environmental group.

“We are increasingly the target of legal actions, investigations, and surveillance,” Le Guet said. “Over the last year, court summons have been raining down,” he said, adding that the movement will continue to hamper new basin construction, nonetheless.

The debate looming in France is a familiar one from the American West to the headwaters of the Nile. The basins “are being politicized and isolated from their context, with the farmers who back them being unfairly designated as villains,” Devaux said.

But “there simply isn’t enough water in the underground reserves to carry on like this, extracting these amounts of water for agriculture,” Marandola said. “And what is done with the water that’s taken should be decided in a democratic way, for every single drop.”

[fascinationex]

My @neveralarchbot fic is coming to an AO3 near you this week (with permission from the bot maker, of course). Here's a preview.

------

[Extract taken from PCMag, December 1985.]

Researchers at the University of M***** were confused last Friday when they received their first message mocking the Decepticons—apparently from nowhere.

"Imagine Starscream answering lonely hearts ads so he can scam people," read the electronic message, which was delivered to over 500 researchers and support staff who have access to the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANet). This cutting-edge technology is used by the United States Department of Defense in research and development applications.

Since the Decepticons woke up on our planet early last year, after their four mega-anna slumber under the earth's crust, much of humanity has lived in fear of their raids. The Decepticon attacks on power stations, university research centres, mines and government facilities have left global supply chains vulnerable and critical infrastructure damaged. The devastation has been widespread, ranging from preventing the delivery of vital food aid in Ethiopia, to the mass power outage last February in Manhattan, which affected the supply to the Presbyterian Hospital and resulted in 227 preventable deaths, including that of 7 year old Susan Ellie.

The messages have left top computing researchers scratching their heads.

Dr Chip Chase is a highly-respected researcher who works on dual-purpose technology in his specialties of computing systems and electronics.

"It's just not that easy to access the ARPANet," said Dr Chase. "It's a pretty limited pool of people. Someone must have written the Neverbot script—if they did, I'd like to meet them. It's light-years ahead of anything I've seen!"

'Neverbot' is what researchers in the know have begun calling the program. It sends at least one mocking message each day, and although sometimes it writes about our Autobot allies, or other known Decepticons, it seems to have a particular fascination with the one Decepticon in particular.

Famously, Starscream is the second in command of the Decepticon army, and ultimately responsible for hundreds of thousands of human casualties across the globe. Photographs taken by our eagle-eyed, bird-watching reader Nick Angelopoulous, 47, have been printed in full colour (opposite).

Neverbot's messages are short, but they're high-impact. Alternately ironic, shocking and hilarious, the messages haven't yet been traced and don't seem to be stoppable—although it seems like researchers might not be trying very hard, either.

"The one we got yesterday was about Starscream starting a radio show about investigating murders," said Dr Chase. "Except he hadn't killed the victims yet. I thought that was pretty funny."

Although electronic mail over the ARPANet is meant to be for university and government business only, it's not the first time someone's bent the rules. In 1978, DEC famously sent messages to over 300 recipients to promote their equipment.

[...]

[End extract]

[jimi-rawlings]

Top 10 New Ongoing Mega Projects in Ethiopia 2024

Nasser Al-Khelaifi MBS

[best2daynews]

Nile Dam: Ethiopia calls US view 'totally unacceptable'

The US is running talks between Ethiopia and Egypt over the controversial mega dam project.

[zvaigzdelasas]

Thursday’s move came even though there is still no agreement between Ethiopia and its downstream neighbors Egypt and Sudan about the GERD’s operations.

Abiy insisted that the third filling of the $4.2 billion dam -- set to be the largest hydroelectric scheme in Africa -- was not causing any water shortages for the two countries.[...]

Ethiopia first began generating electricity at the dam in February. Currently, the two turbines, out of a total of 13 at the dam, are generating 750 megawatts of electricity.

The GERD is ultimately expected to produce more than 5,000 megawatts, more than doubling Ethiopia’s current output.[...]

The new US envoy for the Horn of Africa, Mike Hammer, discussed the project during visits to both Ethiopia and Egypt last month, saying Washington was “actively engaged” in supporting efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the dispute.

11 Aug 22

[africanglobe]

AFRICANGLOBE – International bid for the construction of six mega solar projects costing about 800 million US dollars is going to be issued soon, according to Ethiopia’s Ministry of Finance of Ethiopia.

https://www.africanglobe.net/business/ethiopia-set-800-million-solar-project/

[kimludcom]

Dubai of Africa? Africa's Rising Giant? Ethiopia's $ Billions MEGA Projects Will SHOCK You!

[sky2starstravel]

Top 10 ongoing Mega Projects in East Africa

Top 10 ongoing Mega Projects in East Africa

Top 10 mega projects in East Africa. The East African region is transforming with multi-billion dollar projects planned or already underway in various sectors of the economy. Projects are underway from Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ethiopia and others. These projects will develop the infrastructure of these countries, improve the economies of East African countries, develop the livelihoods of their…

[factinworld]

The World's Largest mega-dam will Generate 5,000 Megawatts of Electricity on the Blue Nile

The World’s Largest mega-dam will Generate 5,000 Megawatts of Electricity on the Blue Nile

Ethiopia starts electricity production at Blue Nile mega-dam. The $4.2bn project is ultimately expected to double Ethiopia’s electricity output, It will produxe 5,000 megawatts of electricity. Ethiopia’s mega-dam project Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed shared a video on his Twitter page on Sunday, February 20, about the country’s mega-dam. Ethiopia’s mega-dam has the potential to generate…

[zambianobserver]

Ethiopia to start generating power from The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD)

Ethiopia to start generating power from The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD)

Ethiopia will start generating power from its controversial mega-dam on the Blue Nile on Sunday, government officials told AFP. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), set to be the largest hydroelectric project in Africa, has been at the centre of a regional dispute ever since Ethiopia broke ground in 2011. “Tomorrow will be the first energy generation of the dam,” an Ethiopian government…

[innocentamit]

Ethiopia starts electricity production at Blue Nile mega-dam | Energy News

Ethiopia starts electricity production at Blue Nile mega-dam | Energy News

Sudan and Egypt see the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam as a threat, but Ethiopia sees it as essential for its development. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has officially inaugurated electricity production from the country’s mega-dam on the Blue Nile, a milestone in the controversial multibillion-dollar project. Abiy, accompanied by high-ranking officials, toured the power generation station…

[zvaigzdelasas]

China’s top official for Africa is headed to Zambia next week, just days after Chinese President Xi Jinping held phone talks with his counterpart from the debt-hit nation. Wu Peng, director general of the Chinese foreign ministry’s African affairs department, is currently in South Africa during a tour of the continent that will also take him to Malawi, Tanzania, Senegal, Burkina Faso and Togo. [...]

Hichilema, who took office last August, raised the issue of his country’s debt crisis during the May 31 call. In a statement posted on his official Facebook page later, he said the two leaders discussed the potential for greater cooperation and their “shared commitment to working together to address and resolve the debt issue”. [...]

Zambia is in the process of restructuring about US$15 billion of external debts as a precondition to secure US$1.4 billion in International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans. Chinese lenders make up more than US$6 billion of the amount, spent on mega projects including airports, highways and hydropower dams. [...]

Zambia has applied to be considered under the G20’s new “common framework” to help more than 70 Covid-impacted developing countries with debt restructuring and relief – a process that would allow creditors to jointly renegotiate its foreign debt. In April, Hichilema thanked China for agreeing to be “engaged” in the debt resolution process. [...] Ethiopia and Chad are the other African countries to have also applied for similar debt relief under the framework, [...]

Zambian hopes of securing a deal with the IMF by the end of June seem ambitious, as a swift agreement on easing Lusaka’s debt burden remains up in the air, considering the very diverse set of creditors.” Zambia is a key Chinese ally, and Chinese companies have pumped billions of dollars into the country’s mining industry. But it was pushed into a debt crisis after the Covid-19 pandemic wiped out revenues. In November 2020, Zambia became the first African country to default on US$3 billion in dollar-denominated bonds during the pandemic, when its debt burden reached more than 120 per cent of GDP. [...]

“Chinese banks will be instructed to engage constructively in the common framework and are likely to insist that any concessions towards the Zambian treasury will affect all lenders equally.”

12 Jun 22

[newshubnaija]

Ethiopia starts electricity production at Nile mega-dam

Ethiopia starts electricity production at Nile mega-dam

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed inaugurated electricity production from the country’s mega-dam on the Blue Nile on Sunday, a milestone in the controversial multi-billion dollar project. The post Ethiopia starts electricity production at Nile mega-dam appeared first on The Guardian Nigeria News – Nigeria and World News.