This image is a general layout of the Gezira Canalisation Scheme in 1933. This irrigation scheme in Sudan, much expanded since its inception in 1925, is still probably the largest such scheme (1 million hectares) under unified management in the world. It consumes today 35% of the Nile’s waters in Sudan and produces half the country’s agricultural output (cotton, wheat, groundnuts, sorghum, vegetables). At its most successful in the 1960s and early 1970s it represented one third of the country’s economy and a significant proportion of its exports, but long years of mismanagement, counter-productive reforms in 2005 and 2014 and changing economic and environmental conditions have much reduced its efficiency.
The Scheme was conceived to produce cotton for Britain’s textile industry, drawing a regulated water supply from the purpose-built Sennar Dam on the Blue Nile. Sudan was administered as a condominium by the United Kingdom and Egypt from 1898-1956. The basic structure of the scheme as conceived in the 1920s continues to compromise its administration: Sudanese landowners were compelled to lease their land to the government and become tenants on the improved lands and management was very centralised. Tensions persist between now-unionised farmers and the Sudan Gezira Board and the Sudanese Government.
The Sudan Archive is rich in records about the foundation and management of the Scheme to 1956 and beyond. The Scheme has been the subject of extensive studies, copies of some of which we also hold – for example, the papers of A.S. Barnett, author of The Gezira Scheme: An Illusion of Development (1977).
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