Principles of ‘sustainability’ have been advocated very insistently during the past decade but they had been eloquently and powerfully enunciated many centuries ago in a saying which in its first part captures with extraordinary simplicity the notion of sustainability and in the second prescribes a moral code which would encourage the principled behaviour necessary for the implementation of sound management of renewable natural resources.

The Nile: an important international resource under pressure

The Nile drains approximately ten per cent of the continent of Africa and includes all or parts of the territories of nine sovereign nation states. The allocation of its waters and the management of them between the competing national and using interests are inevitably complicated and tend to be highly charged with respect to water rights, and the resulting tensions are likely to become of greater significance in future. The present international relations and the pattern of water resource allocation and management are determined partly by the status, that is the volume and quality, of the water resource, and partly by the predictable attitudes of governments and peoples to an annually varying resource, the ownership of which is not clear.