CAIRO, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- The Egyptian Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday that Egypt supports a quartet mediation for the talks on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) being built on the Blue Nile.
"Egypt agrees to the Sudanese proposal that involves the United Nations, the African Union, the European Union, and the United States," said the ministry's spokesman Ahmed Hafez in a statement.
Earlier in the day, Sudanese Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources Yasser Abbas urged the negotiating parties to consider GERD a means for regional cooperation rather than political tension between Khartoum, Addis Ababa, and Cairo.
Egypt's statement came following a meeting between Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Soukry and the visiting Alphonse Ntumba Luaba, the coordinator of the unit in charge of the Democratic Republic of Congo's chairmanship of the African Union.
The unilateral second filling of the Ethiopian dam is scheduled for July.
Ethiopia started building the GERD in 2011, while Egypt is concerned that the dam might affect its 55.5-billion-cubic-meter annual share of Nile water. Sudan has recently been raising similar concerns over the 4-billion-U.S.-dollar dam as a "direct threat" to Sudan's national security.
Over the past few years, tripartite talks on the rules of filling and operating the GERD, with a total capacity of 74 billion cubic meters, have been fruitless, including the early ones hosted by Washington and the recent ones by the African Union. Enditem
