Hmm, guess that’s tacit permission for Canada to do the same with our southbound water then eh? >:(
These idiots already failed to renew that treaty, as if the US isn’t downriver.
“Mexico’s continued shortfalls in its water deliveries under the 1944 water-sharing treaty are decimating American agriculture —particularly farmers in the Rio Grande valley,” the department announced on the social platform X, via its Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.
I… What? Mexico doesn’t deliver water to the US, they’re downstream. We have a treaty with them to leave so much water in the Colorado by the time it reaches the border. I guess they’re just making shit up?
Based on an article I read over the weekend: There’s a treaty where they get a certain amount of water from the Colorado and we get a certain amount of water from the Rio Grande. It’s supposed to be roughly the same amount of water per year, but they wrote the treaty to operate on a five-year cycle so things could be adjusted if there was a drought.
The US government is claiming (and I have no idea if this is true or not) that Mexico regularly undersupplies water for the first four treaty years and then desperately tries to make up the deficit in the fifth year, leaving US farmers with farms suffering from insufficient water for four years and then too much access to water the final year.
Considering the admin, I’m currently assuming it isn’t true.
Based solely on my reading of the article, Tijuana needs water so they get it via treaty from the Colorado river in the USA. Texas and probably other areas need water so Mexico provides it, under the same treaty, from the Rio Grande. That’s just my guess based on the article but there is a link to a PDF of the actual treaty in there if you want to read it.
It’s a shame we don’t have a government agency dedicated to eliminating wasteful spending, since they could’ve done their own job and avoided this situation by cutting off the subsidies that are the only thing that prop up south Texas rice cultivation - the biggest waste of water in the region.
Would’ve been nice if California could’ve kept it’s water in reservoirs then siphoned off the paltry (relative to basin gains) amount Mexico was looking for, might’ve been useful for the farmers
It’s really under-appreciated how weird and pathetic you have to be to do something evil every day. Fucking Scooby-Doo and comic book villains have more nuance. Even Boris and Natasha were serving the fatherland even if they were evil in the Cold War era minds of Rocky and Bullwinkle.
