Kenana wants to more than double output to over 1 million tonnes annually and establish itself as a major exporter, managing director Mohamed El Mardi told Reuters in an interview.

Sudan, one of Africa’s largest sugar producers after Egypt and South Africa, imports more of the sweetener than it exports because of strong local demand. Officials hope new factories and other improvements will reverse that by 2014.

Rising sugar exports would also help the country make up for losing three quarters of its oil output when South Sudan seceded last year, fuelling a foreign currency shortage in the north. Oil used to account for about 90 percent of Sudan’s exports.

Over the past few months there have been negotiations with Ethiopia by Egypt’s interim government on the proposed Renaissance Dam project, tension on the Nile seems to be growing, with Egypt demanding it does not lose any of its colonial era water rights, while upstream nations like Ethiopia are telling Cairo they deserve more access to the world’s largest river.

Only a few years ago, the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) was celebrating its 10 years in existence in Alexandria. All the major players were present, from World Bank officials to water ministers across the region. The result from that optimistic meeting has been near disastrous, with a smaller spin-off movement growing among upstream nations that Egypt says threatens their very ability to deliver water to their citizens.

They claim “national security” as the prime reason or their opposition to any real negotiations for water. Part of that is true. Egypt is growing at a rapid pace, with the population expected to reach 120 million by 2025, according to the United Nations Population Fund. But the reality is Egypt must negotiate and change its ways over Nile water, or East Africa could become embroiled in a water war of unprecedented character.

Egypt’s doomsday scenarios to justify its dominance of the Nile’s water may be real, but the sad fact is too many Egyptians suffer water shortages today, on a daily basis. Not in the five years that the Egyptian government claims.

The assessment is drawn from a classified National Intelligence Estimate distributed to policymakers in October. Although the unclassified version does not mention problems in specific countries, it describes “strategically important water basins” tied to rivers in several regions. These include the Nile, which runs through 10 countries in central and northeastern Africa before traveling through Egypt into the Mediterranean Sea; the Tigris-Euphrates in Turkey, Syria and Iraq; the Jordan, long the subject of dispute among Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians; and the Indus, whose catchment area includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Tibet.

“As water problems become more acute, the likelihood . . . is that states will use them as leverage,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity. As the midpoint of the century nears, he said, there is an increasing likelihood that water will be “potentially used as a weapon, where one state denies access to another.”

farmlandgrab.org | Egypt’s Citadel to grow crops in South Sudan

A unit of Egyptian private equity firm Citadel Capital plans to cultivate up to 40,000 acres of farmland in South Sudan to sell staple foods such as maize in the newly-independent nation, an executive said on Tuesday.

…The United Nations warns that around a third of the country’s roughly 8 million people will need food assistance this year after bad weather and violence hit farming.

Citadel is investing about $30 million to produce staples such as maize, sorghum and sunflower in the oil-producing Unity state bordering South Kordofan, project manager Peter Schuurs told Reuters.

‘We have so far 4,000 acres and we will be planting this year, primarily maize with some sorghum and sunflowers,’ said Schuurs, managing director of Concord Agriculture, a fully-owned Citadel unit.

‘Our focus is food security in South Sudan… we will be supplying the local markets,’ he said on the sidelines of an investment conference in Juba. ‘We will plant the crop in June.’

Ethiopia to Accelerate Land Commercialization Amid Opposition | Bloomberg

An escalation of the land program will “eventually result in the government having to face its responsibility for the human-rights violations caused by so-called development schemes,” said Oakland’s Executive Director Anuradha Mittal in an e-mailed response to questions yesterday. “In the meanwhile, pressure on international donors to stop aid to the government of Ethiopia will gain further strength.”