The governments of Mexico and the United States face a drought in their more than 3,000 kilometers of shared border in the middle of a complex bilateral relationship and with difficulties for fulfilling the treaty of international water distribution sealed between the two countries in 1944, they warned on Wednesday specialists on World Climate Day.
In an interview with Efe, Dr. Rosario Sánchez, director of the Permanent Binational Water Forum, recalled that the agreement between Mexico and the US was a world reference because it established the bases for an equitable distribution of cross -border water, but warned that climate change, demographic growth and economic activities have raised friction.
“The situation of the Río Colorado and Río Bravo basins (known as Rio Grande in the US) is critical, especially since the treaty does not provide the current conditions, of growth, or climate, or permanent drought, or of increase in consumption. The treaty is quite optimistic: the volumes assigned to each country do not meet the expectations, in fact there is no longer that volume in the account,” said Sánchez.
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Juan Jaime Sánchez Meza, a lawyer specialized in water use in Hermosillo, Sonora, remarked that drought alerts do not respond to a threat, but to a reality.
“We are not at risk of drought, we are living it (…) the drought is not like a cyclone or a tremor that sweeps in seconds, the drought is slow and insidious, slowly brave so its gravity is not perceived,” he warned.
According to the agreement, Mexico stays with two thirds of the Rio Bravo channel and yields the remaining third to the US.
As a counterpart, EU contributes to Mexico every year 1,850 million cubic meters of the Colorado River, which mostly travels through US territory but crosses the border until it flows into the Mexican Mar de Cortés.
Breaches by both parties
Last week Texas legislators urged President Donald Trump to include in the tariff negotiations pressures so that Mexico complies with the border distribution of agreed water, and the US government announced last Thursday that it will deny Mexico’s application for the delivery of water from the Colorado River to Tijuana.
“As a result and for the first time, the United States will deny an application outside the Treaty (of international waters) by Mexico to give a special water distribution of the Colorado River for Tijuana,” said the Undersecretariat of State for the Western Hemisphere of the United States Department of State.
President Claudia Sheinbaum recognized, in turn, that the border distribution of the agreed water between Mexico and the United States is affected by water scarcity, but promised to meet the problem after the claim.
“It is going to attend, so that it is known, it is already being treated,” said the Mexican president at her morning conference without offering more details.
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The Colorado River supplies more than 44 million people in several US states (Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and California, among them) and two Mexicans (Sonora and Baja California), as well as 2.2 million agricultural hectares, according to a report from the Wilson Center Studies Center.
For its part, the Rio Bravo supplies water to 15 million people in three US states (Colorado, New Mexico and Texas) and four in Mexico (Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas), and water 1-2 million agricultural hectares.
With EFE information
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