ARTI Egitto definitivo - ARTI Puglia

The river carves a narrow, cultivated floodplain, never more than 20 kilometers wide, as it
travels northward toward Cairo from Lake Nasser on the Sudanese border in front of the
Aswan High Dam. Just north of Cairo, the Nile spreads out to form a fertile delta about 250
kilometers (150 mi) wide at the seaward base and about 160 kilometers from south to
north.
Before the construction of dams on the Nile, particularly the Aswan High Dam (started in
1960, completed in 1970), the fertility of the Nile Valley was sustained by the water flow
and the silt deposited by the annual flood. Sediment is now obstructed by the Aswan High
Dam and retained in Lake Nasser. The interruption of yearly, natural fertilization and the
increasing salinity of the soil has been a manageable problem resulting from the dam. The
benefits remain impressive: more intensive farming on thousands of square kilometres of
land made possible by improved irrigation, prevention of flood damage, and the generation
of millions of gigajoules of electricity at low cost.
1.5. Main Industries
The main industries in Egypt are tourism, Iron and steel, cement, engineering industries,
petrochemicals, chemical industries (especially fertilizers and pharmaceuticals), plastic
products, military production, textiles, ICT and food industries. The ICT, Information and
Communication Technology, represents one of the newly emerging sectors in the Egyptian
industry. Egyptian Industry will be studied in a separate section.
1.6. Mineral and Energy Sources
Fig. 3 - Oil Production and Consumption
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THE RESEARCH AND INNOVATION SYSTEM IN EGYPT