World leaders are in Paris today to discuss the future of Libya. Delegates will not just talk about security and freedom for Libyans, they will also be looking at the economic opportunities for their own countries in a ‘new Libya’.
Risky business
Dutch companies like Shell, Damen Shipyards, construction company BAM (Tebodin), engineering company Arcadis and pipe supplier Libitco have already indicated that it is too early to think about returning to Libya. UN sanctions are still in place and there’s no stable government. For the time being, business in the north African country will remain classified as ‘highest risk’ as in a recent report by analyst Dun & Bradstreet.
Great Man Made River
Mr Koopman thinks there are other areas in which Dutch entrepreneurs can play a role besides in the oil and gas industry. Take agrifood and infrastructure for instance.
And there is water, of course. Right now, Unicef and the World Food Programme are supplying the stricken population with water, but there is a huge reservoir under the surface of Libya’s desert. The 40,000-year-old Nubian Sandstone Reservoir contains an estimated 150,000 square kilometres of water. The basin lies under Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia.
Gaddafi started a huge project back in the 1980s to access this fossil water: the Great Man-Made River. He called in experts from abroad to help. Many of the Libyans who have worked on the project were trained at Delft’s Technical University and at the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education - which was partly set up by the Netherlands. Although the Great Man-Made River project has not been completed, it has supplied coastal cities in recent years. More >>>
Let us not forget Saudi Arabia's disastrous experiment of growing wheat in the desert and depleting 300 billion cubic meters of water. As for the cost in terms of water, between 1980 and 1999, a gargantuan volume of water, the equivalent to six years flow of the Nile River into Egypt—was used. Editor.
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Location:Amman
