Word: nile
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...defense expenditures, which now devour $2 billion, or 25% of the gross national product (v. $3.6 billion, or 30% for Israel). Sadat is hard-pressed even to feed his 37 million people, 96% of whom are crowded in a narrow, seven-mile strip running 500 miles along the Nile. Egypt's trade deficit has been revised upward to $4 billion this year, and short-term debts to commercial banks have risen to about the same amount...
...Abdel Nasser as President in 1970. Since then it has got worse. One of the problems is geographic: though vast in area, Egypt is mostly desert. Fully 96% of its population is jammed into a narrow green belt averaging seven miles in width and 500 miles long in the Nile Valley. Another problem is the population itself, which is growing at a million per year despite belated efforts to control...
Outside Cairo, Sadat's power base includes the 'umdas, or mayors, of rural villages; bred in the Nile Delta village of Mit Abu el Kom, Sadat is as comfortable with local mayors as he is with sophisticated city dwellers. In fact, Sadat functions as if Egypt were one big Mit Abu el Kom and he the great 'umda. Sadat has pretty much neutralized the once-mighty Arab Socialist Union, which Nasser established as Egypt's only political party. He uses the A.S.U. only as a sounding board of grass roots opinion; membership is no longer mandatory...
Critics of the dam point out that it has obstructed the natural flow of silt that enriched the soil of farms along the Nile. Thus it has been necessary to increase the use of imported chemical fertilizers on farms downstream from the dam. Environmentalists also contend that elimination of the silt flow has increased the rate of erosion along the Mediterranean coast adjoining the Nile Delta. In addition, they claim that the absence of the organic matter in the silt in the waters at the river's mouth has deprived sardines and shrimp of an adequate food supply...
...flood control provided by the dam has posed other problems. Residents along the Nile's banks now endure increasing rodent populations that were previously curbed by the cyclical floods. In towns bordering the river, sewage systems that once were regularly flushed out by the flooding and subsequent receding of the river have become badly clogged. The most serious criticism of flood control is that the drainage of more than 1.2 million acres of the nation's rich farm land below the dam is now insufficient Much of that land has become increasingly saline, reducing agricultural productivity...