Ahmed Fadl-Khartoum

A new round of negotiations for the Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, ended with an agreement to hold a new meeting in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, next month, expected to resolve the contentious points related to the technical rules for filling the dam and the number of years.

On Saturday and Sunday, the third in a series of Renaissance Dam meetings between Sudan, Egypt and Ethiopia was held in Khartoum in the presence of observers from the US Treasury and representatives of the World Bank.

The head of the Sudanese delegation, the negotiating minister of irrigation and water resources, Yasser Abbas, told reporters that the Khartoum meetings ended with proposals from the three countries for the first filling and annual operation, which will be studied by each country separately.

Abbas pointed out that Sudan presented an initiative from the last meeting in Cairo related to the minimum behavior behind the dam and the continuous operation in the medium behavior and coordination mechanism, but he added in Khartoum meetings definitions of drought and ongoing drought.

Convergence despite differences
According to the Sudanese minister, the proposals put forward in the two-day Khartoum meetings will be discussed at the Addis Ababa meeting on January 9 and 10 next January.

He added that the proposals deal with definitions of drought, continuous drought and the necessary precautions for operation in both cases.

The minister warned that there is a great convergence in the positions of the three countries, saying that it is not possible to talk about differences or agreements because the technical issues related to the first filling and employment are interrelated, before he acknowledges differences in some views that will be discussed at the next meeting.

The Minister reserved reservations on expressing any information related to the volume of water stored behind the dam in the first filling, stating "that the minimum disposal determines the years of operation, meaning that less disposal means more years of operation, and the large disposal behind the dam means fewer years."

And he expressed his hope to resolve the sticking points during the Addis Ababa meeting early next month, before the Washington meeting on the 13th, 14th and 15th of next January.

The Khartoum meeting came after the second meeting of the foreign and water ministers of the three countries in Washington on December 9, under the auspices of the US Treasury Secretary, in which the previous two rounds of negotiations were evaluated.

Egypt fears that the construction of the Renaissance Dam, which Ethiopia started in 2012, will reduce the level of the Blue Nile if the filling process is carried out too quickly.

The Nile provides 97% of Egypt's water needs, and 95% of Egypt's population of more than 100 million lives on its banks, according to the United Nations.

Ethiopia announced that the huge dam, which costs $ 4 billion, will start producing electricity by the end of 2020, and it will be in full operational capacity in 2022, and Addis Ababa says it does not aim to harm Egypt's interests.