A giant drilling rig can be seen from a distance in the heart of the desert west of Upper Egypt's Minya Province, surrounded by heavy equipment as well as energetic engineers and workers in red overalls, white helmets and face masks. It is one of the three rigs belonging to the Chinese international drilling firm ZPEC, which has so far drilled 120 out of the 300 water wells for Canal Sugar, a 1-billion-U.S.-dollar joint venture between Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, to reclaim land for one of the largest farms in the Middle East and establish the largest beet sugar factory in the world. The owners of the Canal Sugar project expressed satisfaction with the performance of ZPEC which helped them reclaim a large portion of the project's 76,000-hectare land, on which about 21,000 hectares of sugar beets are expected to be planted in the next six months.
