CAIRO: President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi discussed ongoing studies on a reclamation project of 30,000 acres in el-Tor, South Sinai, through establishing model resorts relying on solar energy, presidency spokesperson Alaa Youssef said in a Monday statement.
Sisi met with Minister of Agriculture Salah el-Din Helal to follow up on the latest development of the current projects, according to the presidential statement.
“The resorts are to include integrated communities of housing, agriculture and established factories for agriculture products,” according to the minister.
Helal also presented the ministry’s vision for the available areas for reclamation in the framework of a 4 million acres reclamation project, besides a plan for drilling wills to irrigate the reclaimed lands.
Sisi recently criticized the government’s performance in achieving the drilling of 4,000 groundwater wells to be used in irrigating the 4-million-acres land reclamation project, during the inauguration of 39 new development projects on July 7.
Moreover, the meeting tackled a follow-up on the steps taken to establish an integrated housing community in Farafra in the Western desert, on an area of 10,000 acres of the reclaimed lands.
The reclamation of 1 million acres in the western desert’s Farafra, Dakhla and Siwa Oases comes within the reclamation of 1.8 million acres as the first phase of the reclamation of 4 million acres, Sisi announced in his electoral platform in July 2014.
Sisi stressed on that the Farafra project is to be completed by next October.
Egypt, among 72 states, kept the malnutrition rate at 5 percent, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO;) maintaining a low rate of malnutrition is among the Millennium Development Goals, Helal said during the meeting.