Ethiopia Delegation Set To Leave For Sudan For Dam Talks

An Ethiopian government delegation is set to head to Khartoum on Saturday to take part in tripartite talks with Sudan and Egypt on Ethiopia's multibillion-dollar hydroelectric dam on the Nile.



"We have agreed on the main agenda of the dialogue proposed by Egypt," Feke Ahmed Negash, director of boundary and trans-boundary rivers at the Ministry of Water, Energy and Irrigation, told Anadolu Agency on Friday.



"The Egyptians proposed [the agenda] in writing to deliberate ways of implementing the recommendations put forward by the international panel of experts," Negash said. "We responded to the proposal positively."



Egypt and Ethiopia agreed to resume tripartite dialogue over the latter's dam project after Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn and Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi met in Equatorial Guinea in June.



The two-day meeting is set to resume next Monday after having been postponed for eight months due to differences between Cairo and Addis Ababa.



Set up in 2011, a tripartite technical committee was tasked with studying the impact of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the two downstream states.



In recent years, tension has marred relations between Ethiopia and Egypt over the former's construction of the dam on the upper reaches of the Nile River, which represents Egypt's primary water source.



Ethiopia says the dam is necessary for its national development plans.



It insists the project won't impact Egypt's traditional share of Nile water, which has long been determined by a colonial-era water-sharing treaty that Addis Ababa has never acknowledged.



By Seleshi Tessema



englishnews@aa.com.tr



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