Cairo - Water resource ministers from Nile River Basin countries on Saturday met to discuss division of the river's water in the coastal Egyptian city of Alexandria.

Speaking on the sidelines of the four-day meeting, Egyptian Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources Mohammed Nasr al-Din Allam denied rumours that Egypt would withdraw from the Nile Basin Agreement.

Egypt would not stand in the way of any project up river, so long as it did not subtract from Egypt's share of Nile water under the agreement, Allam added in remarks carried by the country's official Middle East News Agency.

Under a 1959 agreement with Sudan, Egypt is allocated 55.5 billion cubic metres of water from the Nile a year.

That agreement was based on a series of notes between the British and Egyptian governments wherein the British promised, in 1929, not to undertake projects in its East African colonies that would interfere with Egypt's water supply.

A report released last week by the Egyptian cabinet's Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC) warned that the country's water needs would surpass its resources by the year 2017.

Roughly 87 per cent of the water Egypt uses comes from the Nile, the IDSC said.

Egypt's rapidly growing population of roughly 76 million people used 64 billion cubic metres of water in 2006, the report said. If consumption and resources continue apace, the IDSC warned, the country would need 86.2 billion cubic metres by 2017, but would have resources of only 71.4 billion cubic metres of water.

The Nile Basin Initiative was formally launched in 1999 "to develop the Nile Basin water resources in a sustainable and equitable way to ensure prosperity, security, and peace for all its peoples."

The countries participating in Saturday's meeting include Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. (dpa)