Mexico's Water Crisis

There is recent a piece in the New York Times about Mexico’s water crisis, which is affecting Monterrey most sevely, but over half of Mexico’s municipalities as well.  This drought is similar to the drought affecting the Western regions of the U.S. - reservoirs are drying up and aquifers are being depleted. The government is trucking water to the driest neighborhoods around the city, many of them illegal settlements of migrant squatters. In the meantime, Monterrey’s business sector continues to hum and to consume its large and unchallenged quota of water, white small businesses are collapsing from the drought.  With this particular article, it is interesting to peruse the readers’ comments.  Many of the North American commenters evince a neo-Malthusian view of the issue.

Reader #1:  I wonder how many of these people have more than two children.  I wonder how easy it is to access contraception or abortion services, and whether or not sex education is taught. These things are just going to keep happening the more we humans arrogantly  and stupidly think it's our right to keep pro-creating like rabbits.

Reader #2:  When will the world address the root cause? It is not fossil fuels. It is not deforestation. It is not pollution. Those are ultimately symptoms, not root cause. The root cause is population growth. Not just in births but the fact that people are living much longer means that there are far more people consuming everything. Consumer consumption is demand for everything

Adding to this in the text of the article are photos of low income people congregating together, waiting for water, combined with accounts of fights breaking out between people from different communities and between these communities and government workers trucking water to different parts of Monterrey. 

The neo-Malthusians are wrong, but are also indicative of the tendency to the blame environmental disaster on the teeming, non-white masses of the Third World, who, having destroyed their own einvironments, are now coming for ours.  In other words, there is more than a suggestion here of what Malm and the Zetkin Collective refer to as green nationalism. 

Inside Climate News offers a more detailed explanation of Mexico’s problems - the Times article, on the other hand, is largely concerned with the symptoms.  Mexico has been experiencing water shortages for at least the last ten years. In 2012, a provision was added to the Mexican Constitution ensuring the equitable distribution of water, but the amendment has never been translated into effect legislation.  Water provision is undertaken by a complex array of different levels of government, with huge allotments given to agricultural and industrial interests and greater access exercised by affluent households.  In addition to the favoritism toward business and the rich, Mexico suffers from a lack of state capacity to manage water.  Inside Climate comments: 

Climate is just one complication of a much bigger problem: the country’s lack of preparation to face its water crisis, she said. Dry weather alone wouldn’t leave people without water if there were reliable storage systems, she said. On top of the lack of infrastructure to store water for dry times, she said, the large number of actors involved in the management of the resource can lead to water pollution and overexploitation.

There is a lack of public investment in developing more resilient infrastructures, particularly with regard to the management of water, in Mexico.  Drought, in other words, does not automatically lead to the protracted water scarcities.  State capacity or the lack thereof is a crucial intervening factor, which is felt most acutely by low income households, like the ones profiled by the New York Times. In this regard, what Inside Climate reports about Mexico is unsettling: 

The last national census in 2020 showed that since 2010, the proportion of households nationwide without access to drinking water grew from 11.8 percent to 22.4 percent. In 2019, Mexico ranked 24th in the World Resources Institute’s list of countries facing water stress. 

It is also important to remark on the geography of drought in Mexico, which is affecting Northern and Central Mexico more than Southern Mexico: 

One interesting sketch of relevant state capacity comes from Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, Ministry of the Future, where the state of California has developed new ground water storage capacities while keeping its fresh water from flowing out to sea and then having the capacity to shift water to its most critical uses.