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The International Water Treaty between Mexico and the United States stipulates that the Latin American country has to send 938 million cubic meters of water from the Rio Grande to the neighboring country to the north every five years. As the National Water Commission announced on February 7, Mexico has more than 500 million cubic meters of outstanding debt for the current five-year period, while it is going through one of its worst water crises.
“We are 535 million cubic meters below the volume committed,” declared José Gutiérrez Ramírez, an official of the National Water Commission (Conagua), on February 7 when he was questioned by local media about the deficit in the water debt that the country Aztec has with the United States.
Mexico has not fully complied with the shipment of water to its neighboring country. It had to deliver 938 million cubic meters to the United States in January 2023, however, it has only delivered 407 million cubic meters to date. The country has until 2025 to reach the five-year goal stipulated in the treaty.
The United States sends 1,850 million cubic meters to Mexico annually after agreeing to an 8% reduction in 2022 in the context of the drought of the Colorado River, an aquifer from which the water sent to the southern neighbor comes from.
Ramírez explains that water deliveries in this cycle have been made difficult because “conditions were very adverse in the Rio Grande basin. The second year there were 296.3 million. There were rains that allowed us to reduce the deficit in deliveries and currently , in the third year of the cycle, 36 million have been delivered”.
Although Mexico sends significantly less water to the North American giant than it receives from it, in recent years there has been great difficulty meeting the quota, due to the waves of drought that have hit the territory, especially in the north of the country.
The water crisis
Deliveries of the resource from Mexican territory occur within the framework of large mobilizations of farmers and indigenous peoples in defense of water.
In Chiapas, dozens of people gathered on February 5 to demand that the national government protect the region’s aquifers. Water is not only a vital resource for human beings, it also represents a central part of the worldview of the indigenous peoples of the south of the country, a way of life that is threatened by the crisis.
In the protests, disagreements were expressed against soft drink and beer producing industries, real estate companies and critics of the Mayan Train, the mega-project of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
In the summer of 2022, Monterrey -the second most populous city in the country- suffered an extreme drought that left more than five million people without water in an area that can reach more than 40ºC.
The city’s water reserves reached historic limits, with just under 5% of their capacity in use. Experts pointed to the overexploitation of the resource and the lack of efficient management of it.
“We are already in an extreme climate crisis,” said Samuel García, governor of the state of Nuevo León, when questioned about the drought that his jurisdiction faced. Now, the situation is relatively stable in this part of the territory, but Mexico continues to be one of the Latin American countries with the highest water stress, according to data from the World Resources Institute.
Overexploitation and inequality
According to data from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography, 24% of Mexican households do not have a daily water supply in a country where the manufacturing industry of sugary drinks, fried foods and beer consumes 133,000 million liters of water annually.
Companies like Coca-Cola consume water from all the states of the Mexican Republic, according to their own corporate data in their water footprint statements along with information from With water.
Consumption is not only unequal between industries and the country’s inhabitants.
According to greenpeacein Mexico City, economically marginalized areas experience that 11% of their inhabitants do not have piped water, while in higher-income homes, only 0.1% of households have these difficulties.
One of the main challenges on the future agenda for Mexico is water. Being one of the countries with the highest risk of water collapse in the region, the responsibility to protect this resource is attributed to both the public and private sectors.
With EFE, Reuters and local media
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