Ethiopia dam to destroy crucial Kenya lake
By Staff Writers
Nairobi (AFP) Jan 20, 2010 The livelihood of hundreds of thousands of Kenyans around the world’s largest desert lake will be wrecked by an Ethiopian dam on the lake’s main tributary, conservationists said Wednesday. “The Ethiopian dam project is going to bring nothing but tragedy and harm to Kenya,” warned renowned archeologist and environmentalist Richard Leakey. The Gilgel Gibe III dam being built on the Omo river, which supplies 80 percent of the water in Lake Turkana on the Kenya-Ethiopia border, is one-third complete. During the two years it will take to fill the dam reservoir Lake Turkana will recede, increasing its salinity, damaging the local economy, degrading biodiversity and increasing the risk of cross-border conflicts, the Friends of Lake Turkana conservationist organisation said. … Around 300,000 fishermen and herders depend on Lake Turkana, while hundreds of thousands more, mainly farmers, rely on the Omo’s annual flooding for river bank cultivation and grazing of livestock. “We are depending on a country that is known for drought, known for rainfall failure, to provide expensive power to Kenya,” Leakey told reporters. “There is no future for hydroelectric schemes in arid parts of Africa.” …
