Effectiveness of Adding a Salt Tolerant Crop to the Egyptian Crop Pattern to Adapt with the Water Salinity and Shortage Conditions

Abstract

The imbalance between the high water demand and the limited water supplies in Egypt makes water resources management a big challenge. The Mediterranean Sea water intrusion is predicted to increase, causing high water salinity at the Nile delta. A future reduction in the Nile’s water supply is also expected to occur leading to further water stress. Such water shortage will increase the re-use of drainage water which leads to further increase in the water’s salinity. This study aims at adding a salt-tolerant crop to the traditional Egyptian crop pattern. Using quinoa is suggested as an alternative for wheat crop in areas with high water salinity, where the wheat’s productivity is negatively affected. The effectiveness of the proposed crop is evaluated by using the agriculture sector model for Egypt (ASME) which estimates the water demand and the agricultural productivity for different cropping patterns. The results show that quinoa is a good substitution that produces a reliable yield in the case of Nile flow reduction. A base case considering the current water supply conditions is first studied. Then, a 10% reduction in the Nile water supply and the population projection in the year 2030 are presented in two scenarios, one of which considers financial incentives for supporting quinoa. The results show that the Nile flow reduction adversely affects most of crops’ yields, and accordingly, decreases the total crops’ water productivity, but quinoa is found to have a potential high yield in case of water shortage. The total yield of both quinoa and wheat together decrease from 8,643 million tons to 8.223 million tons for the scenario of 10% Nile water reduction without economic incentives, while it jumps to 11.474 million tons  under the same conditions but with  incentives that encourage the farmers to cultivate quinoa