The Egyptian Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation, Mohamed Abdel-Aty, said that Ethiopia does not disclose the amount of its consumption of Nile water, in light of the stagnation of talks on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which Addis Ababa announced the start of the second filling process.
The Egyptian minister indicated - in an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera - that Cairo has developed strategic plans to confront the water scarcity, including the establishment of the largest water treatment plants in the world.
He stated that the Renaissance Dam suffers from technical problems that prevented the completion of the second filling of the dam.
Amid the stalled negotiations for months, Ethiopia on the fifth of last July notified the two countries downstream of the Nile, Egypt and Sudan, to start the process of a second filling of the dam with water, without reaching a tripartite agreement, which Cairo and Khartoum rejected as a unilateral measure.
On the eighth of last July, the UN Security Council concluded that it is necessary to re-negotiate the Renaissance Dam intensively, under the auspices of the African Union, in order to sign a binding legal agreement that meets the needs of the three countries.
At the end of that month, Sudanese Foreign Minister Maryam Al-Sadiq Al-Mahdi said that Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra had presented an initiative to solve the Renaissance Dam crisis, including a tripartite summit.
Ethiopia accuses Egypt and Sudan of not recognizing that filling the Renaissance Dam did not harm them, while Sudan warned of an imminent flood of the Blue Nile, and Egypt also confirmed that the level of the High Dam lake would rise soon.