From Blue Community Ambassador Rosario Sánchez:
Drought and decisions: the future of water.
Mexico has been failing to meet its water debt to the US, and a new deadline is approaching on 24 October.
The Rio Grande has witnessed historic agreements, diplomatic disputes and shared dreams between Mexico and the United States. Since 1944, both countries have committed to sharing their waters through a binational treaty, but today that agreement faces a test that was not on the radar 80 years ago: climate change, or in more scientifically honest terms, drought induced by a management model based on intensive and extensive water use.
The droughts that plague the border region are not isolated events. They are part of a new normal: empty dams, overexploited aquifers and communities without secure access to water; clear signs that the current model is at its limit.
However, there is a tool within the 1944 water treaty between the two countries that could help us address this crisis: the extraordinary drought clause.
This provision allows Mexico and the United States to temporarily adjust (although there are no signs that they will back down) their water delivery obligations when hydrological conditions are exceptionally adverse.
Until now, the extraordinary drought clause only allows reductions in the Colorado River Basin and the upper Rio Grande. Its application in the lower Rio Grande basin is different and specifies the possibility for Mexico to fall into deficit and ‘pay’ its water debt in the following year or cycle, a provision that Mexico has allowed itself to use time and again until the United States grew weary of it and, this year, President Donald Trump finally said ‘enough is enough’.
There has never been any talk of the possibility of reductions in Mexico’s allocations from the lower Rio Grande, because the treaty does not contemplate that possibility, but neither does it deny it. There is a system of ‘minutes,’ which are adjustments to the treaty that could grant that possibility, although this might imply a greater demand for water control in the border states by Mexico.
24 October is the deadline for Mexico to cover its water deficit, which far exceeds the current storage capacity of all its dams on the tributaries of the Rio Grande. Is it time to extend the application of the ‘extraordinary drought’ provision to possible reductions by Mexico to the United States? Are we ready for this bitter pill that is water management in Mexico?
The other option would be to continue “praying” for a hurricane to fill the international dams, as has been the case since the 1990s. That, or continue “kicking the can down the road” and fall into deficit.
The question then would be: who do we choose as our adversary? The United States, or the remnants of the Mexican Revolution?
