FEATURE - Water woes plague US-Mexico border
Date: 18-Jun-02
Country: MEXICO
Author: Deborah Tedford
The man-made waterway has nurtured crops in the western United States and Mexico for 60 years, but a new California plan to conserve water by paving the canal has Mexicans fearful their desert breadbasket will wither into a wasteland.
The dispute is one of several cross-border water spats that characterize U.S.-Mexico water policy, forged when the region was sparsely populated and tuna (cactus pear) was the only fruit of the desert.
Since 1942, the All-American Canal has taken water from the Colorado River 82 miles (132 km) west into California's Imperial Valley, its seepage creating underground aquifers that provide ground water to Mexico's Mexicali Valley.
The water windfall has been a boon to agriculture in California and the Mexican state of Baja California, creating a $1 billion a year industry in California and 50,000 acres (20,000 hectares) of rich farmland in northwestern Mexico.
But the Imperial Irrigation District, which operates the canal, now plans to line 23 miles (37 km) of the clay trough with concrete - eliminating seepage and the ground water that 2,500 Mexican farmers use for irrigation.
"From the air, you see one valley - not the border, not the Mexicali Valley and the Imperial Valley," said Sergio Salinas, a Mexican official who fields complaints from Mexicali farmers.
"If they put cement in the canal you will still see one valley, but one side will be green and one side will be brown."
Susan Giller, spokeswoman for the irrigation district, said the plan to line the canal was not intended to hurt Mexican farmers, but to help California meet a federal mandate to reduce water consumption.
California, the most populous U.S. state, has exceeded its 4.4 million acre-feet share for at least a decade, drawing on the unused allotments of neighboring Arizona and Nevada.
But those states have seen their populations explode in recent years and now demand that California live within its water budget.
Giller said the seepage is water California has paid for and should have been receiving all along.
But the project could devastate Mexico's agriculture industry when it is completed in 2005.
DESERT TURNED GREEN
Nature gave the twin valleys warm weather year-round, but man stepped in to thwart the desert's cloudless skies and make the region fit for agriculture.
Mexico's government has drilled more than 400 wells to tap underground reserves. Canals grid the landscape, taking water to thirsty farms where alfalfa and wheat drink 67,000 acre-feet of water that seeps from the All-American Canal annually.
An acre-foot of water is the amount needed to fill an acre (0.4 hectares) to a depth of one foot (30 cm). One acre-foot is equivalent to 325,850 gallons (1.23 million litres).
A 1944 treaty between the United States and Mexico governs the disbursement of water from the Colorado River to seven U.S. states in the west and two Mexican states, with an annual average of 1.5 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado River going to Mexico.
On the other end of the border, the treaty stipulates that Mexico allow water from six major tributaries to flow into the Rio Grande River, with one-third of that (or an annual average of at least 350,000 acre-feet) earmarked for south Texas and two-thirds going to neighboring Mexican states.
But Mexico has fallen behind in paying its dues and now owes more than 1.5 million acre-feet of water to south Texas - enough to fill the Super Dome stadium in New Orleans 520 times over.
Texas farmers say the lack of water has devastated their crops and many in the U.S. Congress now want the treaty renegotiated.
Without irrigation, little more than cactus grows in the Chihuahua and Sonoran deserts that stretch along most of the 2,000-mile (3,200-km) border, where less than 10 inches (25 cm) of rain falls annually.
Water is so precious that the city of El Paso, Texas, which borders Chihuahua in Mexico, pays homeowners as much as $1,000 to replace
