Water in California – US and Mexico
Posted on March 21, 2008
Filed Under Articles, Reportage |
The US made a desalination plant in Yuma, Arizona, where the Colorado River leaves the US to enter Mexico. The US uses 90% of the water of the basin of the river, and leaves 10% to Mexico. The problem is, everytime the water is used for irrigation, its salinity increases to 3000 grams of salt per cubic meter of water. It is not fresh water anymore, not salty water either – brackish water.
In the Imperial Valley, the irrigation authority dumps this brackish water in the Salton Sea, and artificial laguna which is slowly becoming the artificial and agro-industrial equivalent of the Dead Sea – as, together with salt, various chemicals are also dissolved in the water too. The laguna, which was a tourist resort until the 70s, with artists from Sinatra to the Beach Boys performing for the vacationers, is now becoming a stinking caricature of the Dead Sea. 
It seems a dirty trick –they put the polluted, salty water in an artificial laguna instead that in the river, but is the best solution. That means that the water from the Imperial Valley does not pollutes the river. Unfortunately, the Valley is not the only user of the Colorado river’s water — although it is the biggest one (it uses 20% of the basin’s water).
Other users put the dirty, brackish water from agriculture back into the basin of the river. This means that when the water arrives in Mexico, it is polluted and salty (almost 1000 grams per cubic metre). And that is why the US had to build a desalination plant – which is not working.
According to Kahled Bali, researcher at the Davies University in the Imperial Valley, water scarcity is the biggest problem Mexican farmers have to deal with. Mexican crops use the same surface as the Imperial Valley, but they only receive half of the water. In addition to that, Mexico is not technologically as advanced as the US. Where the US farmers drain their irrigation water out of the crops, the Mexican ones don’t.
Dreinage is not a very complicated technology, but it looks hard work. You have to take out 2m (6 foot) of soil; put a layer of sand with perforated pipes (30cm or one foot diameter); be sure that the pipes have the right inclination so they can take the water in and drain it outside the field; have a network of canals for collecting the drainage water.
That means that in Mexico all the salt (and the chemicals) dissolved in the brackish water remain in the land, which becomes increasingly less productive.
José, the young man I took in the car with his wife and son, told me that his relatives grow grain, and that they have to dig their own well. No network for the water in, no network for the water out. You make your own work. That is another difference with the US. Water to the US farmers arrives a no charge – they only have to pay for the internal distribution system. In Mexico they have to pay for the excavation works, and for the electricity needed by the pumps.
Mexican agriculture can very hardly compete with the US one. In the US, farmers have the free consulting of a research centre organising the irrigation system, have almost free water, dreinage system. The distribution network of the final product does not seem the same either. In the US the alfalfa (a grass for feeding cows) is sold directly to the cattlebreeder. In Mexico, on the dirt roads leading to the California gulf, the farmers have put poster advertising their product.
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