17th September 2026
There is an extraordinary experiment taking place in the Egyptian desert which most people in Britain will probably never have heard of.
It is called the Toshka Project, or the New Valley Project.
The basic idea sounds almost impossible. Take water from the River Nile, move it into the Sahara Desert and use it to create hundreds of thousands of acres of new farmland, new communities and eventually a new economic region.
It is an idea that has already consumed enormous amounts of money and attracted plenty of criticism. Yet Egypt has not abandoned it. Instead, the project has been revived and expanded.
Egypt's Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation now says that 517,000 feddans have been reclaimed and cultivated at Toshka, with a final target of 720,500 feddans. There are 491 kilometres of canals and 19 lifting stations serving the project. The ministry says national investment in the project exceeded 40 billion Egyptian pounds by 2024.
So is Toshka an extraordinary example of turning desert into productive farmland, or an extraordinarily expensive way of trying to overcome a problem that nature created for a reason?
The answer is rather more complicated than either description suggests.
Why does Egypt need Toshka?
Egypt is effectively a desert country with a remarkable exception.
That exception is the Nile.
For thousands of years Egyptian civilisation has depended upon the narrow strip of fertile land around the river. Today, however, a huge population is concentrated along that same relatively small area.
The result is pressure on farmland, housing, infrastructure, employment and water.
The obvious solution is to find somewhere else to put people and grow food.
The problem is that most of the country is desert.
The Toshka idea therefore emerged as an attempt to create a second agricultural and population centre away from the traditional Nile Valley and Delta.
The original plans envisaged much more than farms. The Egyptian government wanted agricultural communities, industrial development, new towns, roads, employment and eventually millions of people living and working in the new region.
In effect, the ambition was to create another Nile Valley where there wasn't one.
The water comes from Lake Nasser
The project became possible because of the huge reservoir created by the Aswan High Dam.
Lake Nasser stores water behind the dam, providing Egypt with a massive strategic reserve.
In the late 1990s, after years of relatively high Nile flows, the Egyptian government decided that some water which would otherwise have remained unused or potentially been released through the Toshka spillway could instead be put to productive use.
The project required one of the world's largest pumping installations.
The Mubarak Pumping Station was designed to lift Nile water from Lake Nasser into a canal system running into the Western Desert. Contemporary engineering reports described it as the largest pumping station in Africa, designed to irrigate around half a million acres of reclaimed farmland.
This is where the project becomes particularly interesting.
Egypt was not simply trying to irrigate a few fields.
It was attempting to move part of the Nile into the desert.
The argument for Toshka
There is a straightforward case for doing this.
If Egypt can convert barren land into productive agricultural land, it gains more food-producing capacity without having to destroy existing communities or squeeze even more development into the crowded Nile Valley.
That could improve food security.
Egypt imports large quantities of food, leaving its population exposed to fluctuations in international prices and supplies. Producing more agricultural products domestically could reduce some of that vulnerability.
There is also an employment argument.
Agriculture requires workers, but large-scale farming can also create demand for processing, transport, storage, machinery, engineering and other businesses.
The Egyptian government says Toshka has already created tens of thousands of employment opportunities and is intended to support agricultural processing and exports as well as food production.
There is also a strategic argument.
A country with a rapidly growing population cannot simply assume that its existing agricultural land will be sufficient forever.
Creating another agricultural region gives Egypt another option.
Modern technology strengthens that argument. Egypt says the current Toshka development uses automated measurement and control systems, real-time monitoring and satellite remote sensing to manage water and agricultural land.
The project is therefore rather different from the one originally conceived in the 1990s.
But there is a very big problem
Water.
Egypt is not a country with an unlimited supply of it.
The entire Toshka experiment therefore raises a fundamental question:
Is it sensible to use scarce Nile water to make desert farming possible when the same water might produce more food or economic value somewhere else?
That is not an argument against desert agriculture in itself.
It is an economic question about the best use of a scarce resource.
One academic study of Nile water allocation concluded that transferring water towards projects such as Toshka could reduce the water available to farmers in the Nile Delta, which is already a densely populated and productive agricultural region.
That creates an awkward comparison.
A farmer in the Nile Delta is working on land which has been farmed for thousands of years.
A Toshka farmer is working in the Sahara.
The second farmer has to be supplied with water through hundreds of kilometres of infrastructure, with pumping stations lifting and distributing that water.
The desert farmer can obviously succeed.
But the question is at what cost?
The original project attracted heavy criticism
Toshka became one of those enormous government projects which appeared to promise a transformation of the country.
The ambition was huge.
But progress was much slower than the original vision suggested.
A detailed academic study published in Environmental Science & Policy in 2013 was particularly critical. It argued that the project rested on questionable assumptions about water availability, food security and its ability to solve Egypt's population pressures.
The paper went as far as describing Toshka as potentially becoming another "white elephant".
That is a particularly important criticism because it changes the question.
The issue isn't whether engineers can pump water into the desert.
They can.
The issue is whether the resulting economic activity justifies the enormous expenditure and continuing demand for water.
Building farms is easier than building a new society
There is another lesson from Toshka which is easy to overlook.
A new agricultural region requires more than irrigation.
People have to want to live there.
That means houses, schools, hospitals, shops, roads, communications and social infrastructure.
It also means jobs that aren't entirely dependent on government projects.
Research into Egypt's wider programme of desert land reclamation found that people moving into new settlements could gain new economic opportunities, but also faced difficulties involving services, living conditions and developing a sense of belonging in the new communities.
This is something that planners around the world occasionally underestimate.
You can build a road.
You can build a pumping station.
You can even build a town.
But you cannot simply order a community into existence.
What about the environmental risks?
Turning desert green sounds environmentally attractive.
There can certainly be benefits. Egypt's water ministry says modern irrigation at Toshka is intended to improve water efficiency and that the agricultural development can help stabilise sandy soils and reduce the movement of sand dunes.
But irrigation in an extremely dry environment has its own risks.
Poorly managed irrigation can result in waterlogging and rising salinity, damaging the soil.
That means drainage is just as important as getting water onto the land.
Egypt has experienced such problems elsewhere. The country's Siwa Oasis, for example, has had serious problems associated with excess agricultural drainage, rising water levels and salinity. The Egyptian government is now spending billions of Egyptian pounds on improving the oasis's irrigation and drainage system.
It is a useful reminder that getting water into a desert is only half the job.
Managing what happens to that water afterwards can be equally important.
So was Toshka a failure?
This is where things become particularly interesting.
It would be easy to look at the original grand promises and conclude that Toshka failed.
But that would not accurately describe what is happening today.
The Egyptian government has revived the project and greatly expanded agricultural development.
Its latest figures say that 517,000 feddans have now been reclaimed and cultivated, with a target of 720,500 feddans.
For comparison, one Egyptian feddan is approximately 0.42 hectares, so the current cultivated area is roughly 217,000 hectares, or about 537,000 acres.
There are now 491 kilometres of canals, 19 pumping stations and more than 313 major hydraulic structures.
And new construction continues.
In 2026 the Egyptian ministry reported work on five major pumping stations associated with an extension of the Toshka canal system, intended to support the reclamation of a further 74,000 feddans.
So Toshka is no longer simply a grandiose plan sitting in the desert.
There is now a substantial agricultural development there.
But success needs to be measured carefully
The Egyptian government describes the modern Toshka project as a successful model of sustainable development and says it is contributing to food security, agricultural exports and employment.
Those are the government's stated conclusions.
But an independent assessment needs to ask some additional questions.
How much did each acre of farmland cost to create?
How much water does each crop require?
How profitable is the agriculture without government-supported infrastructure?
How many people have permanently moved into the new communities?
How much food is being produced for Egyptians rather than for export?
And, perhaps most importantly:
Would the same money and water have produced greater benefits if invested in improving existing farmland and reducing water losses?
Those questions don't make Toshka a failure.
They are simply the questions that have to be answered before calling it an economic success.
A lesson far beyond Egypt
There is a reason Toshka is worth knowing about in Britain, even though it is thousands of miles away.
Britain is not building a new Nile Valley, but governments everywhere face the same temptation.
When a country has a difficult problem, there is an understandable attraction in building something enormous that appears to solve it.
Sometimes that works.
Sometimes the infrastructure becomes the achievement rather than the economic activity it was supposed to create.
Toshka demonstrates both sides of the argument.
Egypt genuinely needs more food, more agricultural land and more economic opportunities. There is a rational case for using technology and infrastructure to expand the productive area of the country.
But water is finite.
Money is finite.
And desert agriculture is never going to be as straightforward as farming beside the Nile.
The remarkable thing about Toshka is therefore not simply that Egypt has managed to make the desert green.
It is that Egypt has spent decades trying to answer a question which sounds simple but isn't:
Can a country manufacture a new agricultural heartland when nature never intended one to exist there?
The answer, so far, appears to be yes, technically.
Whether it is the best economic use of Egypt's scarce water and money is a much more difficult question.
And that may ultimately determine whether Toshka becomes remembered as one of Egypt's great development achievements or as one of the world's most expensive experiments in trying to overcome geography.