Ethiopia, Egypt To Resume Nile Dam Talks On Aug. 26

Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan will resume their tripartite talks on an Ethiopian multi-billion dollar hydroelectric dam on the Nile in late August, an Ethiopian official said Tuesday.



"The negotiations will resume on August 26-27," Fekahmed Negash, director-general of boundary and trans-boundary rivers at Ethiopia's Water Ministry, told Anadolu Agency.



Cairo and Khartoum had earlier accepted a proposal by Addis Ababa to hold the talks in Sudan in the third week of August.



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.



The committee's activities, however, were suspended in January amid mounting tension between Cairo and Addis Ababa.



Negash said the committee will "pick up where it left off at the time of its disruption, which is the formation of a committee for conducting two proposed studies."



The two proposed studies, he said, involved a hydrology simulation model and a trans-boundary social, economic and environmental impact assessment.



In recent years, tension has marred relations between Ethiopia and Egypt over the former's construction of a major dam project 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 Addis Getachew



englishnews@aa.com.tr



www.aa.com.tr/en - Addis Ababa