Fox Vows to Repay Mexican Water Debt to U.S.

Seeking to quell a lingering and complex dispute, President Vicente Fox promised Wednesday to pay off a huge Mexican water debt to the United States that is causing economic hardship among Texas farmers.

In a statement issued from Europe, where he is traveling on state business, Fox said he would announce in two weeks a water conservation plan and a schedule for his nation to reimburse its neighbor about 1.5 million acre-feet of water. Fox said he and President Bush discussed the issue Tuesday by telephone.

Fox promised “to comply completely with Mexico’s international obligations, reducing the deficit of deliveries to the United States and guaranteeing at the same time supplies to border populations and attention to the interests of Mexican farmers,” the statement said.

The U.S. government asserts that Mexicans have not lived up to a 1944 treaty that calls for them to turn over 350,000 acre-feet of water a year where six Mexican tributaries flow into the Rio Grande. Both the Mexican and U.S. sides of the binational International Boundary and Water Commission agree that there is a huge water deficit owed to the Americans, although the quantity has not been officially fixed in recent years.

An acre-foot refers to the amount of irrigation water it takes to cover an acre of land to a depth of a foot. The amount owed by Mexico is equivalent to more than 480 billion gallons of water.

Traditionally, the water that Mexicans deliver to the United States is measured and stored at two southern Texas reservoirs: the Amistad near the town of Del Rio and the Falcon about 50 miles south of Laredo. Both are at low levels, with Amistad at 38% of capacity and Falcon at 10%.

“We welcome the willingness of President Fox and the Mexican government to address the water problem,” said Sally Spener, spokeswoman for the El Paso-based U.S. section of the International Boundary and Water Commission. “We await with interest the details of the proposal.”

“The key question is what Fox means by compliance,” said a U.S. official who asked not to be identified. “How much water when?”

Mexico’s inability to supply the water it owes is due to poor or nonexistent waste-water recovery in watershed areas of Mexican border states and explosive population growth on both sides of the border, which has put pressure on demand, said Tomas Martinez Saldana, a water specialist at the College of Postgraduates near Mexico City.

Compounding the problem is that northern Mexico and southern Texas have lived through drought for the better part of a decade.

“The history of the frontier is one of water disputes. But since the 1944 treaty was signed, population in the Rio Grande basin has grown from 200,000 to 20 million, not to mention the industrial growth, and that has meant conflicts,” said Martinez, who added that the two countries should rewrite the water treaty.

With crop yields down and farm unemployment rising, southern Texas farmers can’t wait for relief. They are especially furious over a new Texas A&M; University study showing that crops in Mexico’s Tamaulipas state are flourishing while theirs are wilting, said Michael Patrick, an economics professor at the university’s Laredo satellite campus.

“For Fox to make this effective he’ll have to monitor every Mexican farmer, and that’s like the U.S. Border Patrol trying to catch everyone coming across the border,” he said. “It can’t be done.”

The Mexican government sees waste-water recycling systems as its best hope for saving the water to work down the deficit. But it cannot afford the expensive systems and has asked the U.S. for financial help.

A spokesman for the Mexican Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that Fox asked Bush at a March summit in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey for $500 million in assistance to build more than 30 waste-water projects in four Mexican border states.

Neither government has issued a public statement about that request, and nothing concrete was announced after the summit.

The Rio Grande is not the only bilateral water dispute. Farmers in the Mexicali Valley are upset about a U.S. plan to reline the All-American Canal from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley, saying it would deprive them of water seepage they use to irrigate their crops.