Good morning and welcome to this, the third regional consultation organised by the World Commission on Dams. I'd particularly like to welcome the Minister of Public Works and Water Resources in Egypt, Mr Mahmoud Abu Zeid, who has given his support for this consultation, and also Mr. Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which is supporting this WCD consultation as part of a broader partnership on a range of issues of mutual interest.

I'm sure that my fellow Commissioners and I will gain as much insight from this Africa/Middle East consultation as we did from our previous two regional consultations held for Latin America consultation in Brazil in August this year, and for South Asia in Sri Lanka a year ago.

This meeting also is an opportunity for the people involved in the dams debate in Africa and the Middle East to share their ideas and views. Too often we find ourselves working in isolation, due to separation based on geographic, ideological, or professional distance. Here in this room today we have environmentalists and utility operators, governments and NGOs, academics and people displaced by dams; experts in engineering, food security, gender issues and fisheries; and agencies that fund dams. We have people from South Africa and Lesotho, Niger and Nigeria, Palestine and Syria, Uganda, Mauritania, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, altogether 26 countries. Welcome, to all of you, and thank you for making the effort to be here today.

We look forward to learning lessons from our host country, which long ago in ancient times realised what has become true for the rest of the world on the brink of the third millennium: namely that water is one of the most vital elements for sustainable development. For African and Middle Eastern countries that are looking to agricultural growth for overall economic growth as well as for food security, the main issue is no longer the availability of land but rather the availability of water.

We can expect competition for water to increase in coming decades in our two regions, due to:

• continued population growth
• increasing urbanisation
• and the difficulty in apportioning water between various interests- communities, industries, and the environment.

You may be wondering why the world needs a Commission that focuses on one aspect of water use-dams. It is chiefly through dams that humankind has manipulated water resources to suit its own ends. And the debate over large dams has come to encompass all the issues at the heart of the unrealised dream of achieving sustainable development. On the one hand large dams have fuelled agricultural and industrial growth whilst on the other hand this has often been at a cost to the environment, to taxpayers, to communities displaced by the dams.

If the WCD succeeds in bringing the parties to the dams debate, together to discuss these difficult issues, and provided its final report next year produces the negotiating tools to resolve those dilemmas, then there's hope for other similarly big issues in sustainable development.

A Brief Overview of Dams

Most dams in Africa and the Middle East have been built to supply irrigation, urban water supply, and to control flooding. Some of the largest dams in the world are located in countries represented at this consultation:

Egypt's Old Aswan Dam has the largest catchment area of any dam in the world, 2.2 million square kilometres; and the Kariba Dam on the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe currently has the world's largest reservoir capacity, at 180 billion cubic meters of water.

Overall, however, the massive dam-building programme of the last half-century passed by much of Africa and the Middle East. Africa. This vast continent, with all its tremendous rivers - the Senegal, the Zambezi, the Volta, the Congo - accounts for just three per cent of the world's large dams. Only six per cent of Africa's estimated hydro potential, and 23 per cent of that of the Middle East, is currently exploited, versus 48% for Western Europe, 55% for North America and 67% for Japan.

So there is far more scope for building dams in Africa and the Middle East. But scope aside, we have to ask ourselves whether dams should have a place in the future development of Africa and the Middle East and what the role and form of any such dams should be.

Creation of WCD

• the imperative to assure the supply of water, electricity and flood control to domestic, agricultural and industrial interests,
• and the desire to ensure that human conditions and environmental considerations are not ignored in the process.

Out of this stalemate the World Commission on Dams was conceptualised and established with the support of both the proponents and opponents of dams.

The Commission is a prototype for what I like to think of as the real New World Order. It is not dominated by any one agency or by one government, or by the UN or the World Bank. The Commissioners are eminent persons from the forefront of the dams debate and as a group they represent all the worlds that intersect therein: international business, NGOs involved in environmental and social activism; academia; government, and the engineering profession.

The Commission's role is to research and make recommendations on the tough social, environmental, economic, and institutional questions surrounding dams, and to investigate alternatives to dams. We are doing so through the 29 WCD studies underway world-wide, through our global submissions programme, and through these regional consultations.

The Commission has a mandate ending in August 2000, after which our final report and recommendations will be published. Today and tomorrow you are helping us along the road toward our conclusions. We hope you will be among those who will make our final report a 'living document' that will influence policymaking and delivery on this essential aspect of water resource management, for decades to come.

Thank you.