Egypt losing 30,000 acres of arable land every year

[Coeus]

Egypt is losing 30,000 acres of arable land each year to urban encroachment, Farouk al-Baz, director of the Boston Remote Sensing Institute, said at a conference held in Cairo this week devoted to land studies.

“All of the country's arable land will completely disappear within 180 years if this trend is not reversed,” he said.

Al-Baz went on to assert that desert land reclamation projects could not serve as substitutes for agricultural production in the fertile Nile Delta.