ONE of the biggest persistent challenges facing Egypt is the water shortage that curbs any development,especially agriculture. Some parts of the Delta have started to suffer a shortage of irrigation water,causing major harm to the agriculture production in this country of 80 million.Taking into consideration that Egypt is importing some 60 per cent of its food needs,and the uncurbed growth of population,it is imperative to work on cultivating new lands depending on sources of water other than the River Nile.This is happening while Egypt has around one million cultivable feddans (acres)on the North Coast,which receives rainwater.However,this nation has been unable to utilise this land for some 60 years now,since both the Allied and Axis forces planted millions of landmines in Egypt 's Western Desert during World War II.Unfortunately,all calls made upon Britain
Germany and Italy,to assume their moral responsibilities towards this bitter legacy and remove or finance the removal of these mines, have ended in very minor financial assistance.Also some maps of these landmines have been made available,but their locations change with the passage of time and climatic effects.Why don't we try another way to send home our problem to the European nations whose armies and government refrain from shouldering the responsibility of removing these mines from the Egyptian territory? Egypt can make use of the annual visits of an estimated three million tourists from Germany,Italyand Britain,and urge these visitors to contribute tothe elimination of such death traps from theEgyptian land that mainly target innocent civilians and hinder development projects in this country.Different travel companies and the Ministry of Tourism could include this problem within their marketing campaigns and request every visitor to pay some $10 additional to the cost of the trip, towards removing just one landmine from the Western Desert.International institutions have estimated the cost of removing a single landmine at $100 to $1,000, according to the technology employed.Nonetheless,the Egyptian Army have managed to remove around three million mines from 3,87,300 hectares in the Western Desert since 1981 at a cost of nearly $27 million,that is around $9 dollars per mine.The success of such a`public campaign could help end the landmine nightmare in Egypt within less than a decade.Hopefully,the European tourists visiting Egypt would positively respond to this suggestion,given that Egypt would never have been part of this world conflict if it had not been living under British occupation at the time.This made it a battlefield for some of the World War II battles,notably at Al-Alamein on the North Coast of the Western Desert. For how long will Egypt continue to pay this heavy cost for a crime it never committed?
