Egypt with Sudan?

[Jackson Lennock]

Egypt is an interesting country. While, technically, it's a very big country, in reality it is 100 million people packed into an area with the farmland or Belgium or Serbia. Because of this, the country is a massive food importer with a fairly high cost of living for a country of its income range. To deal with this, the Government tries to come up with projects like the New Valley Project or the New Administrative Capital or flooding the Qatarra Depression


What if, upon independence, Egypt had gotten control of Sudan? Even if it only included North Sudan, that'd be an area where a sort of overpopulated Egypt could encourage Egyptians to move to. Sudan also has as much Arable land as the rest of the Arab World put together, but it hasn't been put to use primarily due to political and economic factors which made outside investment risky or untenable. One video here shows that that has been changing as of late.

 

[Ricardolindo]

I posted a thread here a year ago about Anglo-Egyptian Sudan being divided between Egypt and Uganda at the Juba Conference of 1947, https://forum.sealionpress.co.uk/index.php?threads/sudan-divided-between-egypt-and-uganda.4159/.

 

[Jackson Lennock]

I posted a thread here a year ago about Anglo-Egyptian Sudan being divided between Egypt and Uganda at the Juba Conference of 1947, https://forum.sealionpress.co.uk/index.php?threads/sudan-divided-between-egypt-and-uganda.4159/.

In the Juba Conference proposal, what would have been the line between north and south? My understanding is that South Sudan was administered separately from the north for some time, but what was the exact boundary? Was it the OTL border between the two countries once South Sudan became independent OTL?




Alternatively, what if Egypt just got the whole of Sudan and engaged in an active campaign of moving poor Egyptian farmers in Sudan North and South? Would Egypt be as repressive as OTL Sudan was? My guess is the more secular-nationalist Nasser regime wouldn't target Christians like the Islamist government of OTL did, but there would be Arab anti-African discrimination akin to OTL Sudan.

Egypt with lands extending into the heart of Central Africa probably would be less oriented towards the middle east.

Merely having political stability in Sudan (or just North Sudan) would mean a larger economy. Plus, Egypt with secure food supplies and fewer population issues (due to internal migration south) could have a wealthier population up north. Food security is a big issue for Egypt, but so is a shortage of land for the poor to work.

 

[Nyvis]

Egypt is an interesting country. While, technically, it's a very big country, in reality it is 100 million people packed into an area with the farmland or Belgium or Serbia. Because of this, the country is a massive food importer with a fairly high cost of living for a country of its income range. To deal with this, the Government tries to come up with projects like the New Valley Project or the New Administrative Capital or flooding the Qatarra Depression


What if, upon independence, Egypt had gotten control of Sudan? Even if it only included North Sudan, that'd be an area where a sort of overpopulated Egypt could encourage Egyptians to move to. Sudan also has as much Arable land as the rest of the Arab World put together, but it hasn't been put to use primarily due to political and economic factors which made outside investment risky or untenable. One video here shows that that has been changing as of late.

The new capital is more about exiting the Cairo mess than about freeing farmlands. And the Qatarra depression plan was never really seriously considered (it's full of salt). What's real and happening is reclaiming land on the edges of the delta and moving cities to high grounds to free fertile Nile Valley land for farming.

That's not really why Egypt import food anyway. The main cause is that wheat is just not a very space efficient crop. Egypt is very fertile but has limited space so it's more efficient to produce valuable cash crops and import wheat.

Also Egypt doing a settler colonialism on Sudan is more likely to be an ethnic disaster of epic proportions than solve its supposed food issues.