Transaqua Plan To Refill Lake Chad Is About To Become an Italo-Chinese Project

FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Transaqua Plan To Refill Lake Chad Is About To Become an Italo-Chinese Project

April 24, 2018 (EIRNS)—Speaking at a meeting with Italian industrialists and representatives of the Chad government April 17 in Rome, Italian Foreign Ministry special representative for Chad, Mauro Lorenzini, presented the Transaqua plan as an “Italo-Chinese Project” to save Lake Chad.

Transaqua envisions the transfer of 3,000 cubic meters of water per second from the Congo basin, Lorenzini said “and it is quite complicated, requiring years to complete. However, in China they actually realized a similar project” which could be considered the pre-feasibility study for Transaqua.

In an April 17 interview with the news agency DIRE, Lorenzini explained that “The project is no longer only an Italian one, but has become an Italo-Chinese project.... The Italian group, Bonifica, made an agreement with the Chinese to represent the project for Lake Chad at the last [Lake Chad Basin Commission] LCBC conference in Abuja,” Nigeria, on Feb. 26-28. The Italian government

“wants to support the feasibility study.... We are helping Bonifica, because it could represent the solution to the very serious environmental crisis of Lake Chad. You know that Lake Chad, due to climate change, is reduced to really small dimensions and it represents survival for large populations in Chad, Niger, Cameroon [and Nigeria]—countries which are part of the basin. And therefore, [Transaqua] could represent the solution—over years, because it is a complex project, but it is the only existing project to save Lake Chad.”