A trilateral ministerial technical meeting between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt on the filling and operation of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has ended without an agreement, APA has learnt on Friday.
The Addis Ababa talks were the fourth and final of a series of meetings approved by the three Nile countries in Washington DC last November.
In the two-day meeting held in the Ethiopian capital from Wednesday to Thursday, Egypt came up with a new proposal that suggests Ethiopia to fill the GERD within 12-21 years.
Dr Seleshi Bekele, Ethiopia’s Minister of Water, Irrigation and Energy, told journalists after the meeting that “Egypt’s new proposal is unacceptable in every conceivable way.”
Egypt’s proposal also assumes an alteration of the natural flow of the Blue Nile River and obliges Ethiopia to compensate the cumulative deficit for the water it uses for filling the dam.
However Ethiopia says Egypt’s proposal zeroes all abstractions including the existing water development projects Ethiopia built for the past 50 years on the Blue Nile.
Ethiopia proposed a filling plan that is stage-based and will take from 4 – 7 years, depending on the inflow at the GERD and to take mitigation measures in the incidence of drought or prolonged drought during filling and the operation of the dam.
According to Dr Seleshi, the insistence by the delegation from Egypt to have its entire proposal accepted has prevented an agreement to be reached on the issue.
The three countries will meet in Washington on January 13, 2020 for a final agreement which would hopefully end the stalemate.
If an agreement is not reached by January 15, they will invoke article 10 of the 2015 Declaration of Principles.
Article 10 states that “the three countries commit to settle any dispute resulting from the interpretation or application of the declaration of principles through talks or negotiations based on the goodwill principle”.
MG/as/APA