Egypt's irrigation ministry dredges its canals, runs them on rotation schedules and has spent years upgrading the network. Yet farmers whose land lies at the far ends of those canals keep making the same complaint: the water arrives late, weak, or not at all. In the summer of 2026 the problem surfaced again in several governorates, putting crops and livelihoods at risk.
In the village of El-Hagar, in Fayoum's Etsa district, the shortage reached the seed in the ground. In June 2026, Mohamed Saleh, a farmer from the village, posted a video on Facebook titled "A report to the Minister of Irrigation and every responsible authority." It showed seeds that, he said, ants had started eating after the land went weeks without water.
The crisis is an old one, Mohamed told Athar. It affects around 3,000 feddans, including the ten he farms himself, almost all of them at the tail end of the Bahr El-Gargaba canal. Under the rotation schedule, water is supposed to flow for about 12 hours a day. In practice, he says, it reaches his land for two or three. Illegal hoses and pumps upstream take their share before anything gets to the end of the canal.
"Part of my land has gone almost two months since July without water reaching it," he said. "When the dry spell drags on, the crops spoil. Some people had to sell their maize while it was still young, as animal feed, before it dried out and they lost even more."
Farmers have filed complaint after complaint, Mohamed says. A committee from the governorate came to inspect. The promises came too. The problem stayed.
Bahr El-Gargaba's troubles go back at least 15 years. In August 2012, farmers from Etsa held a protest over water that never reached their fields.
In October 2016, with nothing resolved, El-Hagar's residents met to discuss the shortage and launched a complaints campaign demanding the removal of illegal intakes and the restoration of their water allocations. Mostafa Mohamed, from the village, set up a Facebook page to log the complaints and track the canal's fortunes. Irrigation officials have known about the problem for years, he told Athar; what farmers are still waiting for is "a lasting fix."
In April 2026 the complaints reached parliament. MP Mostafa El-Banna submitted a briefing request on the harm to Etsa's farmers from the drying up of Bahr El-Gargaba, calling for an inquiry into its causes and action to address them.
From Fayoum to Beheira: help that comes after the loss
In Village 21 near Abu El-Matamir in Beheira governorate, Ahmed Ismail, 48, was living the same story. He rents five feddans at the end of a canal. In August the water stopped for about 16 days, he says, in the middle of a heatwave. His maize, only 45 days in the ground, began to show damage. "In heat like that, a crop can go eight days without water at most. After that it's ruined."
His land is served by a branch canal under the North Tahrir irrigation directorate. The official rotation is five days of flow followed by 15 days off. What actually happens, Ahmed says, is three days on and around 25 off. That is enough for the land at the head of the canal. It is not enough for the tail. And this outage, he adds, was not the first; they come in cycles.
He does not blame the rotation alone. Some landholders with no official water allocation pump from the canal into private tanks, he says, and every tank filled upstream is water that never arrives downstream.
The water did eventually return to Ahmed's land. By then the maize had already begun to yellow and curl.
Egypt's Field Crops Research Institute advises that maize needs regular irrigation, especially at flowering: moderate watering every 10 to 12 days depending on soil and weather, with neither drought stress nor waterlogging.
Ahmed is not alone in the village, he says; other farmers there face the same thing.
Over the past months, farmers in several governorates have complained of weak or late water at the ends of canals. This report documents cases in Beheira, Fayoum and Giza.
The Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, for its part, has announced measures to improve distribution and make sure water reaches the fields: dredging canals and clearing weeds, rubbish and obstructions, regulating distribution through rotation schedules, and confronting encroachments on waterways. In June 2026 it announced a plan to dredge some 33,000 kilometres of canals and 22,000 kilometres of drains, with around 1.4 billion Egyptian pounds set aside for canal dredging. The aim, the ministry said, is to keep the network able to carry the required flows and deliver water to every user.
Rotation is one of the ministry's main tools for managing distribution, particularly on canals that do not run continuously. Each irrigation directorate sets periods when water is released and periods when it is held back.
The Water Resources and Irrigation Law No. 147 of 2021 puts the ministry in charge of managing and organising distribution, and requires the relevant directorates to publish their rotation timetables.
Alongside rotation, the ministry dredges canals to remove the weeds, waste and obstructions that limit how much water a channel can carry. In 2025 it reported dredging around 33,000 kilometres of canals out of a network of roughly 45,000.
Still the complaints from the tail ends continue. Which raises the question this report set out to answer: between the moment water is released on schedule and the moment it should reach a field, where does it go? And why do the complaints outlast the announced projects?
The water's journey: where it stalls
Irrigation water leaves the Nile through a hierarchy of main and branch canals, then into field ditches and finally the fields themselves. On parts of that network, rotation governs who gets water when. But between the schedule on paper and the water on the ground, several things can go wrong.
In El-Hagar, the farmers who spoke to Athar list them: encroachments on the waterway, water drawn off by hoses and lifting pumps, rice grown where it is not permitted, the surge in demand every summer, and the simple fact that their land is at the end of the line.
Mohamed Ghanem, the irrigation ministry's spokesman, has said in a television interview that water needs rise at the start of the summer season as temperatures climb, and that distribution is managed according to need, cultivated area and crop type.
Rice is one crop under special control. For the 2026 season the state authorised 724,200 feddans across nine governorates: Alexandria, Beheira, Kafr El-Sheikh, Gharbia, Dakahlia, Damietta, Sharqia, Ismailia and Port Said. Growing it anywhere else is banned.
Fayoum is not on that list. Yet El-Hagar's farmers say rice is being grown on land along Bahr El-Gargaba, adding to the pressure on the water available, on top of the illegal pumping and encroachments they describe.
In a separate case, the ministry offered its own explanation for a canal running low. In July 2026 it issued a statement about a video of the El-Maasara canal in Beni Suef, saying the footage was filmed during the "off" period of the canal's three-way rotation, that water was released as scheduled afterwards and reached the canal's end, and that its engineers and technicians monitor crops in the field. The situation, it said, was stable.
The farmers of El-Hagar and Village 21 say their problem is different. It is not confined to scheduled closures, they told Athar. The rotations run late, or the water is too weak, or it simply does not arrive during the periods when it is supposed to be flowing.
Encroachments and erratic rotations are not the only points where the journey can break down. The ministry itself says that blockages inside the channels, and the condition of the structures and gates that regulate flow, affect how well the network can move and distribute water. Its canal and structure rehabilitation works, it says, are meant to raise that efficiency and get water to every user, including the land at the tail ends.
That is the rationale for the National Canal Rehabilitation Project, whose stated aim is to restore canal cross-sections and improve conveyance and distribution across the network. The government's announced plan targeted around 20,000 kilometres of canals at an estimated total cost of 80 billion pounds, to help water reach the tail ends, reduce farmers' complaints and share water more fairly.
The work extended to the hydraulic structures too. In March 2024 the ministry set up a project unit to rehabilitate water structures, gates and flow-control works. It is auditing 3,283 structures previously recorded as being in poor condition, out of roughly 54,000 on the register. According to the latest published update, 1,067 had been assessed in the first two phases, about 650 of which need replacement or renovation. The rest are being reviewed in a third phase.
But the scale of the announced projects does not mean their effects reach every village equally. In El-Belida, in Giza governorate, residents complain that rubbish and waste piling up in some of the waterways is stopping irrigation water from reaching their fields.
"The village has three canals irrigating about a thousand feddans, and they all suffer from waste building up," Fouad Mamdouh, a resident, told Athar. "Branch number one, east of El-Belida, hasn't had water for more than two years because the channel is blocked with rubbish."
Residents complained to the local authorities and to irrigation officials, he says, and the head of the Mazghouna irrigation office eventually got in touch, inspected the site and promised to dredge the canal and build it a new outlet.
The Bahbeit canal, which passes west of the village, has a different problem, he says: the rubbish is not cleared regularly, so the water slows and arrives late. And when the water is held up for long enough, some farmers go looking for other sources to save what they can. Those alternatives carry costs and risks of their own.
When the water stops, who pays?
In El-Belida, the unreliable canals have pushed some farmers onto groundwater from wells, at their own expense.
"Instead of relying on canal water that doesn't come regularly, farmers in our village sink a pipe for groundwater," Mamdouh says. "It's an expensive way to irrigate, and it isn't good for the land in the long run."
He calls it "artesian irrigation," a term some local studies also use for farmers turning to wells to make up for canal shortfalls, although the strict scientific definition of an artesian well is narrower and does not cover every groundwater well.
Not every farmer has that option. Some cannot afford to sink a well or set up any other source, Mamdouh says, so they leave the land unplanted and wait for the water to come back.
Other farmers who spoke to Athar said the switch to groundwater had damaged some land and crops. "Well irrigation made the soil saltier," one said. "The yield isn't what it was, and vegetables don't take any more."
Groundwater does not by itself salinise soil in every case. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), salt build-up depends on the salinity of the irrigation water, how the water is managed, and how well salts are leached and drained; rising salinity in the root zone reduces a plant's ability to take up water and cuts its yield.
In Egypt, a study of the north-eastern Nile Delta published in Scientific Reports in November 2024 found a strong link between shallow, highly saline groundwater and soil salinity in the study area, compounded by poor irrigation water quality and low soil permeability.
Between leaving the land fallow and trying to save the crop, some farmers find their choices narrow. In El-Hagar, Mohamed says there have been times when he had to irrigate with agricultural drainage water. "I can't use groundwater here because the rock is too close to the surface. So I water with drainage, even though it does harm, rather than let the crop die." Agricultural drainage water is the runoff from irrigation and farming that plants have not used, leaving the fields carrying pollutants with it.
A study published in 2021 evaluated three drainage-water reuse projects in Beheira. Most of the indicators it measured in the drainage water and in the blended water exceeded permitted limits. It rated the quality of the drain water between "poor" and "marginal," and the blended water in the canals it examined as "bad," and recommended treatment before use in those cases to avoid harm to soil, crops and health.
Ahmed, in Village 21, has no such fallback. "The groundwater in our area is salty and no good for irrigation, and the drain is far away." His only option, as he puts it, is "to wait for relief."
Ahmed Galal, former dean of the Faculty of Agriculture at Ain Shams University, says a shortage or irregularity of irrigation water directly affects both the quantity and the quality of a harvest. How much is lost depends on the crop and on its growth stage when the water fails; every crop has critical stages when it is most sensitive to drought stress.
"The damage from water stress isn't limited to stunted plants and lower yields," he told Athar. "It extends to the final product: size, appearance, taste, nutritional value. All of that can affect what it sells for and what it's worth to eat."
Repeated shortages on a wide scale could reach the market, he adds. "Water is fundamental to farming. Any recurring failure in supply shows up in the size of the harvest, and that can feed through to crop prices, with economic and food consequences."
While farmers pay for the water's failure with their crops and their land, the question remains: who is responsible for removing the obstacles that stop it arriving?
Who is responsible?
Responsibility for getting irrigation water to the fields is split between several bodies, says Sabry El-Gendy, a former adviser to the Minister of Local Development. "Removing rubbish from inside the canals is the irrigation authorities' job," he told Athar. "Removing the waste along the banks and taking it to landfill is the local administration's."
In Village 21, Ahmed Ismail sees the encroachments and the erratic rotations as an administrative problem, one that falls to the irrigation ministry's own agencies to deal with.
Ibrahim Abdel Samie, the irrigation inspector for El-Nasseriya, denies there is any problem on Branch 21. "The rotations are regular and don't run late," he told Athar. "The office doesn't shut off the water until it has confirmed it has reached the land at the end of the branch and the farmers have irrigated."
The damage to the maize in Ahmed's videos cannot necessarily be blamed on water alone, Abdel Samie argues. Crops can suffer for other reasons: how well they are tended, weeds or disease, problems with pesticides.
Ahmed rejects that. He is not the only one affected, he says, and any authority is welcome to come and inspect the crops and see for itself what damaged them.
What about solutions?
Dumping waste outside designated sites is a crime, yet rubbish keeps accumulating in some canals and waterways. Article 71 of the Waste Management Law No. 202 of 2020 sets a fine of 10,000 to 100,000 pounds for disposing of non-hazardous waste anywhere other than a designated site, rising to imprisonment plus a fine for repeat offences.
Neither the penalties nor the dredging have stopped the problem returning in some places. The clearest example is the El-Hagarsa canal in Sharqia governorate. In June 2026 a video circulated showing large amounts of rubbish in the canal and water failing to reach the fields. The irrigation ministry's teams moved in to clear it and dredge the channel. Less than a week later, the ministry announced that the rubbish was back at the same spot.
El-Gendy's view is that clearing canals, dredging them and relying on inspection will never keep them clean for long unless there is also a regular system for collecting waste and disposing of it away from the water.
"The solution starts with the village and town councils," he says. "Designate collection points, provide regular transport to take the waste away from the waterways, and fine the people who break the rules."
On illegal pumping and encroachments that starve the tail ends, the irrigation authorities in Fayoum run campaigns to remove unlicensed pipes and pumps along Bahr El-Gargaba and file charges against offenders. But some of those intakes, Mohamed says, "come back" after they are removed.
The water crisis was solved once before, he recalls, two years ago, and only temporarily. "In August 2024 a group of farmers went to the irrigation minister. After that the officials got in touch, and about a week later the water reached us. It stayed fine until the crisis came back in mid-May 2026."
The water arrived then, he points out, even though several of the factors farmers complain about today were already present. That is what makes him believe that releasing more water, or managing it better, could change things quickly.
Mostafa, who runs the "Bahr El-Gargaba Disaster – Fayoum, Etsa" Facebook page, calls the interventions so far "painkillers, not a cure."
Athar contacted the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation to ask what it did in 2024 to resolve the Bahr El-Gargaba crisis, why the problem has returned along with the encroachments and illegal pumping despite the removal campaigns and prosecutions, and what lasting measures could stop the crisis and the complaints recurring. The ministry had not responded by the time of publication.
The water may well reach Mohamed and the farmers of Bahr El-Gargaba again. What the past years leave open is how long any improvement lasts, and whether the crisis simply returns, as Ahmed's complaints returned in Beheira and the rubbish returned to El-Hagarsa days after it was cleared. No single factor explains it. Rotation management, encroachments, the state of the channels, waste, and slow responses to complaints each mark a point where the water's journey can break down. The state has announced projects to rehabilitate the network, clear it and improve distribution. The test is whether those measures hold on the ground, so that water reaches the last field on the day the farmer needs it.