Testing the Waters of Cooperation

The Anzalduas Canal should be brimming with water this spring, irrigating thousands of acres of rich Mexican farmland south of the Rio Grande along the Texas border.

Instead, one of the largest canals in Latin America holds only a foot or two of stagnant water, choked with reeds and old tires.

The pathetic conduit is one sign of a water shortage so severe that for the first time in recorded history, the Rio Grande stopped flowing into the Gulf of Mexico in February. The sluggish river has so much silt in it that it has become a new informal border crossing.

The water shortage on both sides of the border is an early, urgent test for 21st century U.S.-Mexican diplomacy: managing scarce natural resources in one of North America’s fastest-growing regions.

A flurry of diplomatic initiatives may yet turn the water crisis into a showcase of cross-border cooperation, producing a new approach to joint long-term planning and management of the 1,250-mile river watershed from El Paso to the gulf. Or it could degenerate into a bitter water war between southern Texas and northeastern Mexico.

At the heart of the dispute is a 1944 treaty that calls for Mexico to give the United States one-third of the water flowing from its tributaries into the Rio Grande--and a minimum of 350,000 acre-feet of water per year. (An acre-foot is enough water to cover one acre a foot deep.)

Mexico blames severe drought for its failure to meet its quotas since 1994. Like a homeowner deep in mortgage arrears, Mexico now owes the United States about 1.1 million acre-feet.

Neither Mexican nor Texan farmers accept the drought explanation. They blame inept water management and uncontrolled growth hundreds of miles higher up the Rio Grande watershed, in the distant western Sierra Madre of Mexico’s Chihuahua state.

Certainly water use has exploded along with population growth in both the U.S. and Mexico. When the treaty was signed in 1944, the border region population was just under 1 million. Now it is 11 million--and it could surge to 24 million by 2020.

The impact is worst in Texas’ lower Rio Grande Valley and Mexico’s Tamaulipas state.

Leaders of the 40,000 farmers in Tamaulipas this month demanded a $100-per-acre payment to offset poor crops that resulted from the lack of water. With as many as 500,000 acres affected, the claim could be worth $50 million.

The Texan farmers across the river, who vaguely claim annual losses of $400 million or more because of the water shortage, are furious that the U.S. government let Mexico get away with running up such a huge water debt during the 1990s. The debt looks almost impossible to repay fully by the October 2002 deadline when the current five-year treaty cycle ends.

The new Mexican and U.S. administrations have made progress in recent months. President Bush, a Texan, pressed President Vicente Fox to do something to help. In March, Mexican and U.S. officials signed a deal in Washington to accelerate Mexico’s water payments this year.

Mexico is to release 600,000 acre-feet of Rio Grande basin water to the United States by July 31, or by Sept. 30 if drought conditions are severe. That is nearly double the required annual average payment and could force Mexico to dip into upstream reservoirs, a step certain to anger communities there.

Even if Mexico manages to comply, Texan farmers will still be short of water. And the larger payment will leave even less water for downstream Mexican farmers. Mexican growers are grumbling that Mexico is providing too much water to Texas at a time of dire need at home. The farmers’ crisis has prompted marches and protests in recent weeks.

The impact is plain in the fields of withered, foot-tall sorghum plants around the Anzalduas Canal’s main channel in the town of Rio Bravo, between the cities of Reynosa and Matamoros.

Farmer Javier Cantu said his 500 acres normally yield as many as 1.6 tons of sorghum grain per acre. Now he will be lucky to get half that much from some acreage. He predicts a loss of about $120 per acre.

“This year I won’t even get close to covering my costs,” Cantu said. “People are very nervous now. We are frightened because we are looking at the reality of major losses.”

Before the drought began in the early 1990s, Cantu planted corn, which yields 30% higher profits. But lack of water forced him and many others to switch to sorghum, which requires less water.

“Why should we be made to pay for the debt that all of Mexico owes to the United States?” he asked.

Jaime Garza, a water consultant for a cooperative in Rio Bravo, said average yields are likely to be down 40% this year because of lack of water. He said crops need to be irrigated every couple of weeks, three to four times per season. This year, “we’re staying alive with one irrigation” per season.

Juan Minana, head of the farmers council for the worst-affected Mexican water district, looks upstream for the blame, to the Rio Conchos in Chihuahua, where “the uses of water have been constantly increased. . . . They are practically sucking dry the dams.”

He noted that the treaty calls for Mexico to keep two-thirds of the runoff from six tributaries, including the Conchos, that flow into the Rio Grande, and for the U.S. to get one-third of the flow. But in recent years, the flow from the tributaries has been minimal--hurting downstream growers on both sides of the river.

“We and the Americans are suffering the same problem, and the proportion of damage is double for us, because we should be getting 66% of the flow and the U.S. side 33%,” Minana said.

A similar treaty governs the Colorado River, and the U.S. gives Mexico a portion of the river water that reaches the border. While the U.S. has never failed to meet its payments, Mexico complains that too little water reaches the Colorado River delta in the states of Sonora and Baja California, leaving the area a desert compared with a century ago.

Texan farmers are hurting as well.

Jimmie Steidinger, a farmer in Donna who grows what may be the sweetest grapefruits in Texas, proudly took a visitor through his immaculate, laser-leveled fruit fields. He has invested heavily in tubing and other new irrigation technology to reduce waste.

The water shortage forced him to buy $38,000 in water rights last year, cutting profits 20% to 25%. “We’ve always had two things against us: the weather and the markets,” Steidinger said. “Now we’ve got a third, unnecessary risk factor: water. This could break a lot of farmers, and some have already gone under.”

Jo Jo White, head of the water district around Mercedes, Texas, said a consultant’s study found that Mexico has no real drought, just overuse in the Conchos watershed.

“It’s been a big hickey put on our economy down here, and south Texas already is a poor part of the United States,” White said. “It was only because of the stakeholders raising billy hell, saying we’re in a world of hurt, that raised this to the diplomatic level.”

At their summit in February, Fox and Bush made the water dispute a priority. Their negotiators agreed a month later not only to speed Mexican deliveries but also to begin work on a joint management plan for the Rio Grande basin.

Thus the crisis could prove the catalyst for a new approach to managing border resources.

Enrique Berruga, Mexico’s deputy foreign secretary for North America, said that beyond paying back more water, “we said to the U.S. that we want to work together on an issue critical to both countries--and that means not just water, but planning on the border.”

Victor Lichtinger, Mexico’s environment minister, called water “the most important environmental problem Mexico has, especially in the border and the north.”

He said 80% of Mexico’s water is used in irrigation--and of that, 55% is lost through leaks and evaporation. He added that the U.S. irrigation system also is inefficient, if less wasteful.

“What I want to propose soon is a binational program of sustainable water use,” he said. “Let’s learn from each other’s errors, and let’s look together at the future, because in reality the future of the border, if seen from just one side, is impossible. . . . Water can be the theme that unites us, or it could be the theme that divides us.”

Mary E. Kelly, director of the Texas Center for Policy Studies in Austin, described the Conchos in a recent report as “an essential ribbon of life in an arid desert climate.” She said that beyond the pain for farmers downriver, the Rio Grande ecosystem was suffering because of reduced water flows in the Conchos.

Management of the Rio Grande water treaty is in the hands of the International Boundary and Water Commission, based in the desert cities of Juarez and El Paso, a stone’s throw from each other on the river.

The commission is credited with effective technical control of border water, including the huge Falcon and Amistad dams on the Rio Grande, but it has no policy powers; it merely administers the treaties governing border water.

Arturo Herrera, the commission chief for Mexico, said the two key needs are improving water efficiency, especially in irrigation, and improving water production, through initiatives such as reforestation of the Sierra Madre to help capture runoff.

He said the new Mexican government is determined to be much more open with farmers and other users about the scale of the problem. “We have to discuss the sacrifices that all will have to make. In a drought, it is impossible to satisfy everyone’s needs.”

Manuel Ybarra, head of international affairs for the commission’s U.S. office, said cooperation has improved since the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in 1994. Before then, “our relationship with Mexico was pretty much territorial. In that atmosphere, it was difficult to have a strong international management system.

“Since NAFTA, it’s more interactive, we have a lot more shared knowledge, and a lot of trust has been built up,” he said.

One model for future cooperation: Juarez and El Paso are conducting a preliminary study for a long-term joint-planning approach to water management.

Hector Gonzalez, planning strategist for the El Paso Water Board, said: “We have more than 2 million people here living from the same water, so let’s work on this together. Two years ago, this level of cooperation was unheard of. Now we’re giving more and more attention to finding regional solutions.”