In his address on the occasion of Labour Day, 2002, President Mubarark put forth a project for “building a powerful Egypt”, capitalizing on the fact that the nation's power could be achieved only through an overall moderni-zation programme.

This is a basic pivot along the road to-wards a major awakening in Egypt that is unfolding day by day.

The object is to realize citizens' aspirations for wel-fare and prosperity through a solid base of major achievements already made in all fields over recent years. Given its history as the cradle of ancient civilization, Egypt will have attained its due standing in the world community.

The President's call at the outset of the Third Millen-nium for modernizing Egypt comes within the context of a national cultural project geared to cope up with world sci-entific and technological advancement. This objective is dictated by development needs as well as by regional and international changes. It also poses as a better approach to globalization challenges.

The national programme for modernizing Egypt, as pro-posed by President Muhammad Hosni Mubarak in his address to the joint meeting of the People's Assembly and Shura Council on December 17, 2000 contained a number of priori-ties and missions.

According to the programme, moderniza-tion was an essential and mandatory requirement and the building of the modern State, by comprehensive and sustained development, constitutes a national project for all categories of the society. Later, in his address to the parliamentary body of the National Democratic Party on June 24, 2001, President Mubarak stressed the need to work for “modernizing Egypt”.

To this end, he called for developing strategies and plans to achieve this goal through objective, in-depth studies and am-bitious projects covering all walks of life in Egypt.

By catching up with breath-taking international advances, we can bridge the wide gap between our present and our fu-ture aspirations for decent life, prosperity and security.
Over the past two decades, Egypt has made positive strides that can serve as an underpinning for the modernization pro-ject in various socio-economic, industrial and agricultural fields.

Salient of these are those giant development projects geared to move out from the narrow Nile Valley. Most impor-tant of these projects are the national projects for developing Sinai, southern Egypt, Toshka, Sharq al-Owainat and Sharq al-Tafri'a.

This book stresses, in words, figures and photographs, that “the building of powerful Egypt” is now coming true. This can be testified by the great achievements materializing day by day everywhere in all agricultural, industrial, tourist and petroleum sites in the east, west, north and south.

Thus steps Egypt into the Third Millennium, armed with reliable infrastructure in all production and service sectors and all walks of life in Egypt.

 Egypt has already gone a long way towards modernization. By all standards, this marks a civiliza-tion shift that serves as a means to address the age of global-ization and information.