According to official figures, Mexico has never had better access to water. 96% of people have access to it, a 20 point increase in 30 years. On paper, Mexico is on the way to a perfect drinking water supply. But reality looks different. Official figures assume that someone has access to water if their home is connected to a public mains, regardless of whether the mains has water. If you think about it, the picture of Mexico changes: The country is drying up.
From 2006 to the present day, fewer and fewer communities have access to water. This year it was 61%. Now it’s only 33%. Access to water improved every year until 2006, but now progress has stalled. Having water every day is a privilege for fewer and fewer people.
In Baja California Sur, the dates are dramatic. While 76% of Southern Californians had access to water on a daily basis in 2000, that proportion has now fallen to 24%. Every day for 22 years in this state, an average of 67 people joined the people without water every day.
Mexico City has also dried up. In 2000, the Milpa Alta Mayor’s Office had water six days a week, now it’s down to three. The wells have dried up or are polluted and the ejidatarios of Milpa Alta refuse to open new wells. Many milpaltenses depend on stormwater collection and a network of dozens of pipes that the mayor’s office sends out weekly. In other areas of Mexico City, such as Tlalpan and Tláhuac, water is only available four days a week. In fact, apart from Benito Juárez, the city’s wealthiest mayoralty, there isn’t a single place where the capital’s residents receive water on a daily basis.
At the national level, there are few cases more dramatic than that of the Doctor Arroyo community, home to 14,000 people in Nuevo León. In 2006, the community received water on average six days a week; only one now
These cases largely mirror what is happening across Mexico: drought, lack of public investment, and inadequate privatized solutions. For example, Doctor Arroyo often has water but no infrastructure to extract it. As Nuevo León’s Director of Water and Drainage, Gerardo Garza, said in an interview with El Horizontal, the wells are sometimes full of water, but pumping equipment exists to remove it. The phenomenon is getting worse as droughts become more frequent and last longer. During droughts of up to nine months, residents have reported being without water for up to 80 days in a row.
Paradoxically, Doctor Arroyo is now dependent on Coca-Cola’s philanthropy. The company, which holds concessions to harvest 28 million cubic meters of water per year, announced it would set up a “rainwater collection pot” to support the community. The pot is a big hole covered with some kind of plastic. When it rains, it is flooded with 18,000 cubic meters of water (0.0006% of the water that Coca-Cola has in concessions). With or without a pot, Doctor Arroyo’s pipes keep getting empty.
Mexico shouldn’t have a problem with access to water. On average, each inhabitant has 549 cubic meters of water per inhabitant per year, more than enough to cover the 50-100 cubic meters of water the UN recommends per person.
The greatest fight for the weakest warrior
If Mexico faces the problem of lack of access to water, it is because the rules of the game are poorly formulated and have favored a lack of coordination and budget, and the concentration of water in the hands of a handful. Everything starts with the constitution. It states that the city administration should be responsible for the drinking water supply. In other words, the level of government, which tends to be structurally poorer, less professionalized and weaker, is responsible for one of the most important services to human life. There are thousands of water managers in Mexico who act in an uncoordinated manner. According to the economic census, there are 2,826 water utilities. In some states like Oaxaca there are more than 200.
These weak warriors face the greatest battle in the land, unaware and fragmented of each other. The work is so thankless and difficult that the directors of water utilities do not stay in office for long. On average, they stay in place for just 1.7 years, documented Hugo Rojas, a water specialist. “They come and they go. You can do almost nothing,” he says.
At the federal level, there is no regulatory agency, just one agency responsible for issuing concessions and water allocations: the National Water Commission (Conagua). Therefore, no one can comprehensively and centrally regulate critical aspects of improving access to water, such as gathering information about the provision of water services or setting targets for their improvement. Nor can an approved system be created to fund the distribution and reuse of water or to determine aspects of urban planning, such as where to locate new businesses or urban settlements.
A young man draws water from a tambo in Milpa Alta. Video: GLADYS SERRANO
The municipalities also have neither a budget nor operational capacities. According to the National Association of Water and Sanitation Entities of Mexico (ANEAS), water and sanitation service providers collect 68,000 million pesos a year in tariffs, barely enough to cover their ongoing expenses. There is almost nothing left to invest. The missing investments are partly covered by the federal budget. However, federal water resources have been declining over the past decade. In 2012, 57,000 million pesos were allocated for water supply and management works, as well as sewage management, drainage and sewerage. According to the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit, the approved budget in 2023 has fallen by 32% in real terms and is now only 38,500 million.
The major household water abandonment occurred between 2015 and 2017, when water use was reduced by 45%. With oil prices falling, the federal government decided to stop subsidizing water investments and take seriously the idea that water supply is a municipal mandate. Back then, the greatest battle was de facto in the hands of the weakest warriors. Over the six-year period, the water budget has increased by 9% in real terms (utilized in 2018 versus what was approved in 2023), which is less than what was consumed in the 2016 budget.
hydrocracy
One of the main struggles of water activists in Mexico has been the creation of a general water law that provides an adequate legal framework for water management coordination and planning at the national level. In the last two legislative periods alone there have been at least six attempts, all of which failed due to differences of opinion.
A big problem is the strong lobbying in business and the agricultural industry. They managed to become the de facto owner of the water in Mexico without anyone saying anything. In Mexico, 75% of water goes to agriculture, according to 2022 data from the National Water Commission (Conagua), and most of that water is managed through concessions awarded to irrigation districts used in agriculture.
The Irrigation Districts are private organizations that have set up what the civil organization Agua Para Todos aptly calls hydrocracy. The hydrocracy is “individuals, families and corporations who control the boards of concessionaires” and are thus able to decisively influence the distribution of water, public resources and even the fees paid by users. His power is enormous. 70% of the licensed water volume is in the hands of 2% of the owners.
In certain parts of the country, irrigation districts have stockpiled so much water that local governments have to beg them to sell them water to supplement urban uses. Such is the case of Tijuana and its unhealthy relationship with Irrigation District 014, which sells it water every year. “The 14th Precinct has hijacked the city,” local newspaper Radar BC bluntly reported.
Water concessions are no man’s land. It is impossible to determine if the concessionaires are taking more water than is allowed because there is not enough vigilance. Conagua has just 141 inspectors overseeing 427,000 water concessions. This leads to potentially unsustainable exploitation of aquifers. In recent years there has even been speculation about water concessions. According to the Agua para Todos collective, banks including JP Morgan, HSBC, Banorte and Citibank, among others, have acquired concessions for agricultural use in areas where selling water is expected to be good business in the future. For example, Banco Azteca has a concession in the Valley of Mexico for 2.2 million cubic meters and BBVA has one in Nayarit for 2.1 million.
“Water touches the most sensitive fibers of all power mafias,” comments Eduardo Bohórquez, who was part of the interdisciplinary team analyzing the latest initiative to create a general water law. The reserves of power are everywhere. Some of these would even be protected by other laws that would have to be reformed in parallel with the new water legislation.
The web of excuses for doing the right thing is long and politically difficult. There are concessions that work and don’t want to change their governance; there are governors who support certain concessionaires and do not want to oust them; There are international companies that could open pre-TMEC investment disputes if the terms of their concessions were changed; There are those who want a regime where the water is regulated at a local level and others who want something more focused. The entire fauna of Mexican power has a little piece of water cake in their claws and no one dares take it from them. The victims are everyone else.
Tidy up the house
“Regular” is no longer optional. In January 2022, the Supreme Court ruled that the Union Congress must enact a general water law before August 2024. The house needs to be put in order. Discussion of the content of this law will be critical to the future of water access in Mexico.
We must be vigilant. There is an urgent need to change the logic of water use. We need to move beyond highly concentrated and privatizing concessions to coordinated, regulated, and unified water use for the common good. The aim is not to abolish all concessions, but to regulate, order, limit and, above all, create incentives for the correct use of water. Water management must be defragmented, power reserves must be abolished.
To reverse the water problem, we need to talk about redistribution. In urban areas like Mexico City, access to water has been given priority to middle- and upper-class areas while the rest have been forgotten. There is a lack of political will to eliminate this spatial discrimination through the mass movement from West to East. At the national level, areas with little water produce agricultural products that use a lot of water, such as alfalfa in La Laguna. And in areas without water, industries are opened. That needs to change. The state must regulate what and where is produced, or create an incentive through prices.
The future of water most likely lies in recycling. It is necessary to invest in treatment and purification processes that allow the reuse of water and its cyclic modulation. On average, 47% of water is lost through leaks due to neglect of water infrastructure. That’s huge.
All this requires large investments. ECLAC estimates that Mexico needs an annual investment of 1.3 percentage points of GDP to solve water problems that have gone unaddressed in years. This investment needs to be continuous at least throughout 2023 and is a lot. This amount corresponds to 87% of total expenditure on security, justice and INE. According to the Department of Finance and Public Credit, the levy is equivalent to 28% of VAT collected.
The dry bottom of the Metztitlán Lagoon, Hidalgo, May 2023. Iñaki Malvido
The new law aims to discuss water charges for all types of consumption, but especially for agriculture. It seems unbelievable, but currently the law dictates that the agribusiness does not have to pay for all the water consumed. This is a deviation. The law must be reformed immediately. Just as individuals pay for water, so must the agricultural industry.
The collection of charges for individual water consumption should also be improved. Water prices are currently heavily subsidized, but for the rich. In Mexico, the poorest quintile pays proportionally more for water than the richest quintile. This needs to change if they are to have resources to improve the quality of infrastructure and promote water reuse.
The water problem needs to be addressed immediately in Mexico. Getting your house in order can’t wait any longer.
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