A lake remade: How Manzala's waters became clear enough to fish for money

Mada

08-05-2025

For over 40 years, Mohamed Okasha earned his living fishing in Lake Manzala. It was his only livelihood — the means by which he fed his family, put his children through school and married them off. But over the decades, he watched the lake — or 'the sea,' as locals call it — dramatically change. Expanding land grabs ate away at the fishing grounds he once knew. Wastewater emptying into it polluted the waters. Some years, the lake yielded nothing at all.
Then came a massive government project to rehabilitate Lake Manzala, with promises to restore its ecosystem and revive the livelihoods of its fishers.
But two years after its completion, Okasha sees little to no recovery. To him, it's as if the lake swallowed up the billions spent on its development, just as it once swallowed his livelihood.
In the past two months, Mada Masr spoke to fishers, researchers and government officials about the rehabilitation of Lake Manzala. While fishers like Okasha have not borne the proverbial fruit of the sea that they hoped the remaking of the lake would bring, the restoration provides a glimpse into how a new military-controlled agency plans to reap the profits from 'sustainable development' projects.
Lake Manzala is Egypt's largest natural coastal lake, located in the country's northeast on the Nile Delta in the Daqahlia Governorate. Named after the Delta city of Manzala, which still borders it today, the lake was once much larger but now stretches across just three governorates: Daqahlia, Port Said and Damietta.
In the latter half of the 19th century, the lake covered more than 400,000 feddans and provided work for nearly 4,000 fishermen — around 67 percent of all those working in Egypt's lakes and along the Nile, according to On the Banks of Egypt's Lakes by Abdel Monsef Mahmoud. Thanks to its abundant yields, its fish were exported to Turkey, Syria and Greece.
By the mid-19th century, the government began allocating parts of the lake to private investors and prominent families in exchange for fees, gradually turning large swathes into private property where fishing was off-limits to anyone but the owners. The system persisted for nearly a century, evolving in structure but keeping power in the hands of a wealthy few.
In the 1960s, fish farming — raising fish in managed ponds — began spreading as a new, intensive way to exploit the lake. Encouraged by the state to boost fish production amid rising demand, the state began investing in hatcheries in 1961. It also allowed large sections of the lake to be converted into fish farms through lease contracts, while turning a blind eye to illegal seizures. This shift came at the expense of small-scale fishers, who found themselves increasingly squeezed out.
In 1983, the Egyptian government officially began regulating the transformations around Lake Manzala with the establishment of the General Authority for Fish Resources Development. The authority was tasked with setting policies to protect and develop Egypt's lakes, combat pollution and encroachment, regulate fishing activity and conduct research and projects to boost fish production. That same year, a law was issued allowing the authority to oversee the leasing of the state's fish farms and hatcheries.
Alongside the authority, other state bodies were also involved in managing the lake — including the ministries of water resources and irrigation and environment, which oversee water management and environmental protection. Enforcement on the ground, meanwhile, fell to the water bodies police under the Interior Ministry, charged with preventing pollution and curbing encroachments and illegal fishing.
But as urban expansion picked up pace in the surrounding areas in the 21st century, the lake's environmental condition deteriorated. Pollution worsened, biodiversity suffered, and both legal and illegal seizures increased — whether to set up new fish farms, control specific fishing zones, fill parts for construction or use the lake for illicit activities.
Over time, vast stretches of Lake Manzala turned into what the Interior Ministry called 'criminal hotspots.' The 2011 revolution and the security vacuum that followed only deepened the crisis. Fishers who have worked the lake for over five decades told Mada Masr that cases of fishers being killed there surged during this period.
In the wake of the revolution, armed takeovers of the lake and its islands expanded. Fishers were driven out, their boats destroyed, their nets stolen— and those who defied orders to stay away from seized areas were sometimes killed. These territories had become hubs for trafficking drugs, weapons, and fish fry, making the lake an increasingly dangerous workplace.
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All these factors had an impact on the lake's fish production, which plummeted to 42,000 tons in 2016, down from 62,000 tons in 2012, according to data from the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics.
Given the importance of Egypt's lakes as major sources of relatively affordable animal protein, the state deemed intervention necessary after decades of neglect. In 2016, it launched an ambitious plan to develop the country's lakes, with Lake Manzala at the forefront. That year, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ordered the lake to be cleaned and restored to its original size. Speaking at a 2019 presidential conference, he reaffirmed his commitment, pledging to 'return Egypt's lakes to what they once were.' That same year, a decree was issued placing lake violations under military jurisdiction to curb the spread of illegal arms and lawlessness in these areas.
The largest lake development project in northern Egypt officially began in 2017, led by the Armed Forces Engineering Authority. It moved to clear illegal structures and unauthorized fish farms, demolishing huts and buildings scattered in and around the lake, with the goal of expanding Lake Manzala's surface area to 250,000 feddans. These efforts were accompanied by crackdowns on what the state described as 'thugs' who had taken control over vast portions of the lake.
The environmental cleanup involved removing dense vegetation, particularly the invasive water hyacinth — locally known as bashneen — a seasonal plant that consumes vast amounts of water and oxygen and clogs the lake's natural waterways. Reeds were also cleared.
In 2020, the second phase of the development plan began in partnership with the United Arab Emirates' National Marine Dredging Company and the Egyptian-Emirati joint venture, Al-Tahadi. The US$163 million project aimed to deepen and widen Lake Manzala.
The third and largest phase of the project, launched in 2021, focused on infrastructure, including the construction of a treatment plant to process the wastewater from the drains that empty into the lake — long considered a primary source of pollution. A recent study analyzing water quality in Egypt's northern lakes from samples collected in 2018 identified Lake Manzala as the most polluted, rendering its fish unsafe for human consumption due to 'enormous quantities of human, animal, and industrial waste.'
The lake receives wastewater from several major drains and treatment plants, including the main facility in Port Said. Over the years, the wastewater from these sources contributed to clogging the lake's inlets that link the lake to the Mediterranean sea and allows new fish species to enter and the water to be naturally renewed. The most polluting of these is the Bahr al-Baqar drain, which stretches more than 190 kilometers from the south of Cairo through Qalyubia, Sharqiya, Ismailia and Daqahlia, dumping 16 million cubic meters of treated and untreated wastewater into Lake Manzala every day. The most important part of this phase was the construction of a treatment plant for the Bahr al-Baqar drain, funded through loans totaling LE160 billion.
To prevent future encroachments, the final development phase also included the construction of a road spanning 70 kilometers, called the 'safety belt,' around the lake's perimeter.
In 2021, the Lakes and Fish Resources Protection and Development Authority was established as a public economic entity under the Cabinet with Law 146. The law led to the merger of the General Authority for Fish Resources Development, which had previously overseen lake management, into the new body, which retained its full powers, according to authority officials who spoke to Mada Masr.
Development works concluded in 2023, with a total expenditure of LE12 billion, aside from the loans acquired for the Bahr al-Baqar treatment plant. As the plan neared completion, Lake Manzala appeared to be on the mend. Its waters grew clearer, and the fish population rebounded. Between 2019 and 2022, the average rate of annual fish production rose to around 77,000 tons, according to CAPMAS.
Gradually, however, old problems began to resurface. The project's deficient vision, flaws in implementation, weak oversight and the failure of responsible authorities to carry out their duties all chipped away at the project's gains. A key and the final element of the plan remains unfinished: installing gates at each city's port to regulate access to the lake. Okasha, who returned to fishing with the same hope he had decades ago, now finds himself facing the same grim reality: a dying lake and powerless fishers.
Local residents speaking to Mada Masr describe scenes that reflect the deteriorating conditions in the lake, contrary to the government's estimates. '[In the sixities,] there used to be fish trucks lined up for four kilometers, loading fish to be shipped across Egypt. Now, by the end of the day, there are four trucks, all loaded with catfish,' says Abdu al-Rayyes, a retired general and resident of the lakefront city of Matareya, echoing a sentiment shared by several others.
Agricultural sciences professor and fish farm owner Maati Qeshta offers an explanation: most of the current production comes from fish farms, not the open waters. These farms operate in closed, controlled environments far more favorable than the open and increasingly inhospitable waters of the lake.
Under the 2021 law that turned it into an economic entity, the lake authority's revenues include income from leasing and operating allocated lands and managing and exploiting lakes and fishing ports and their resources — a model that marks a shift toward a profit-oriented mandate as the government suspended the funds it allocated to the former authority. With the need to self-finance, the authority raised leasing prices, which in turn contributed to a surge in fish prices.
There were many problems, but the most entrenched — one that no amount of dredging or oversight can resolve — lies in how the state views the lakes. 'A lake is a natural, open space for fishing. It should stay that way, not be turned into a giant fish farm only available to whoever can pay. These farms take away the open fishing areas and fry that should be accessible to fishers, and they drive up prices for consumers because everything about them is artificial and monetized,' says Ahmed Abdel Karim, who owns a fish farm near Port Said.
To Abdel Karim, fish farms belong outside lakes and seas. 'Lakes serve specific purposes. We can't just convert parts of them into farms. Lake Manzala, for example, should be the lungs of the Delta. It protects agricultural lands from seawater intrusion, serves an environmental role as a rest stop for migratory birds and has research value as a major freshwater body in the Delta,' he says.
Neglecting the lake as an ecological resource and letting its condition deteriorate has pushed many fishers to abandon their profession passed down to them through generations — and, in many cases, abandon their homeland as well. Former fisherman Mohamed al-Far says many of his peers gave up on the profession years ago amid worsening conditions, taking up jobs as drivers or laborers in the Port Said Public Free Zone, while others sought work in the Red Sea region or abroad. Hundreds of young men have attempted to flee to Europe by sea, with many dying en route, he says.
Beyond the issue of fish farms, five fishers told Mada Masr that infractions have worsened since the development project curtailed illegal land grabs, prompting violators to recoup their losses more aggressively. 'Things are back to how they were,' says Zaher Fayyad, the head of the Fishermens Syndicate in the city of Gamaliya, overlooking the lake. 'The struggling fisher is still struggling, while the powerful ones come in with fast boats and two automatic rifles, using curtain nets and electrofishing,' he says.
Curtain nets, banned under fishing laws, are fine-meshed nets that sweep up everything in their path, including fish fry, decimating fish stocks. Their use now goes beyond overfishing — it's become an illicit trade of its own: fry are collected for fish farms rather than purchased from official hatcheries, and small fish are ground up into feed as a cheaper alternative to commercial fish food, whose prices have surged amid Egypt's foreign currency crisis.
Other destructive methods have become widespread — most notably electrofishing. In this method, fishers connect metal nets to electric generators and lower them into patches of water hyacinths, where fish nest and spawn. The fish are stunned and float to the surface for easy harvesting.
This method, banned in many countries, devastates aquatic ecosystems — including plankton, the base of the aquatic food chain. A 2019 study by the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science found that areas exposed to electrofishing lose 57 percent of their species.
'These violators work at night — or in daylight if they have the right connections. And they'll kill anyone who gets in their way,' Fayyad says. 'They strip the waters bare with trawlers and electric currents. If you confront them, they'll say they're collecting fry for some general's fish farm.'
Another destructive technique is what is locally called tahawit, where violators build reed barricades surrounded by nets to trap fish entering the lake from its sea inlets. These barriers block water flow, causing stagnation and increased pollution.
All of this unfolds amid an almost total absence of the water bodies police, who only carry out occasional raids. Several sources — fishers, a fishers union chief, fish farm owners and fishery professors — told Mada Masr that the force justifies its inaction by claiming they can't catch the violators, who use high-speed, illegal boats that are far more powerful than the force's own equipment.
Fishers also accuse the lakes and fish resources authority of failing to enforce the law — particularly seasonal fishing bans during spawning months, June through August, which has further depleted the lake's fish stocks. These violations were documented in formal complaints submitted by Lake Manzala fishers to government authorities and reviewed by Mada Masr.
Moreover, the development project has not fully resolved the pollution issue. The lake still receives more than 10 million cubic meters of untreated wastewater daily, as the Bahr al-Baqar treatment plant only handles 5.6 million cubic meters of the 16 million that flow into the lake each day.
Pollution and illegal activity are not the only culprits. According to the same sources who spoke to Mada Masr, flaws in the development process itself have exacerbated the lake's problems.
The agency responsible for the development of Lake Manzala failed to upgrade the gates regulating the flow of seawater through the inlets, resulting in an unprecedented spike in the lake's salinity — from under 5,000 parts per million before development to 25,000 ppm, according to Qeshta. The sharp rise in salinity has had devastating consequences for the lake's ecology, particularly for freshwater fish species.
Moreover, large stretches of reed and papyrus were cleared from the lake's perimeter during the development works, destroying crucial natural habitats. The removal of reeds in particular disrupted the reproductive cycles of species like tilapia — the lake's most abundant fish — as the vegetation had served as a natural breeding ground. With the plants wiped out and the lake dredged to depths exceeding four meters in some areas — depths never before present — tilapia populations have declined. Tilapia generally live in waters no deeper than one and a half meters, researchers and fishers tell Mada Masr.
Qeshta says that after the Armed Forces Engineering Authority, under the leadership of now Transport Minister Kamel al-Wazir, took charge of the development project, it convened a meeting with 50 experts, including officials from the former fish resources authority, the National Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries, and leaders from the engineering authority itself. While many who attended the meeting were reluctant to speak openly in front of military representatives, Qeshta spoke out, recommending that 30 percent of the natural vegetation be preserved to protect biodiversity. He also raised objections to the lake deepening plan for another reason: putting fishers at risk of drowning. But the minister dismissed him, saying: 'What qualifications do you have? Just because you run a fish farm you think you get to speak? That's enough from you.'
Mohamed, 54, was one of the fishers who drowned in Lake Manzala after the deepening project. He was the sole provider for his wife and two children, his brother Shehata tells Mada Masr. 'Since the deepening, many fishermen have grown fearful of the lake and have stopped fishing altogether,' he says. Following Mohamed's death, the head of the Lake and Fish Resources Protection and Development Authority promised compensation for the family, but 'no one ever followed up,' Shehata adds.
The removed vegetation had also served as resting grounds for migratory birds, whose numbers in the lake have since visibly declined. The development work, which was carried out without adequate environmental impact assessments, violated Egypt's commitments under the agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds.
The reeds were not only ecologically vital — they also provided livelihoods for local women who used them to craft traditional reed curtains, commonly used to roof homes and huts.
Though the lake's development project officially concluded in 2023, the future of its management remains uncertain. The absence of a comprehensive plan became especially apparent after a surprise presidential decree in December transferred jurisdiction over Lake Manzala from the Lakes and Fish Resources Protection and Development Authority to Egypt's Future for Sustainable Development Agency — a military-controlled body established in 2022, whose authority has since expanded to include the management of key national resources. Although the decree was issued months ago, the Cabinet only made it public on April 28, announcing that the Nation's Future Party would assume responsibility for managing and operating Manzala and other lakes.
Mada Masr reviewed a letter sent by the presidency to the Cabinet in December 2024 relaying Sisi's directives: All powers and responsibilities from the Lakes and Fish Resources Protection and Development Authority are to be transferred to the Egypt's Future for Sustainable Development Agency, similar to what had been done with lakes Bardawil and Nasser. All transactions related to the lake, its surrounding lands and affiliated fish farms should be suspended. The jurisdiction, not only over Lake Manzala, but its smaller and subsidiary lakes, adjacent lands and fish farms, including those near the June 30 Axis, is to be transferred from all previously responsible entities to the agency.
A source at the lakes authority confirmed that the agency began overseeing the lake and carrying out preliminary procedures on April 13.
The Egypt's Future for Sustainable Development Agency has increasingly tightened its grip on Egypt's food security sector, from land reclamation and lake management to taking over wheat imports from the General Authority for Supply Commodities, and holding a majority stake in the Egyptian Mercantile Exchange. Its role has since expanded to include importing wheat — previously the mandate of the General Authority for Supply Commodities — supplying local wheat for the Supply Ministry, and overseeing Lake Bardawil — and now Lake Manzala as well.
The consequences of transferring powers from the lakes development authority to the agency remain unclear, but one potential impact, according to a senior official from the authority, is a further rise in fish prices. The 2021 merger of the fish resources authority into the lakes development authority had already transformed the institution from a service provider into a profit-driven economic entity, which was a key driver of rising fish prices, the official tells Mada Masr.
'Before 2021, the state allocated us over LE1.079 billion annually. After the shift to an economic entity, we were expected to self-finance and recoup that amount ourselves, so we increased lease prices for fish farms — and that pushed up fish prices, since 80 percent of Egypt's fish come from farms,' the official says.
As Egypt's food security landscape is reshaped, Lake Manzala remains a depleted resource — treated as a mere economic asset rather than a dying natural ecosystem.