Mexico's Strategy to Continue Handing Water Over to US is Unsustainable, Warns Expert
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The Director of the Permanent Forum on Binational Waters asserted that Mexico must renegotiate the 1944 Treaty, otherwise it will not be able to guarantee deliveries.

This article by Jorge Salcedo originally appeared in the December 11, 2025 edition of El Sol de México.

Mexico’s strategy for fulfilling its Rio Grande water allocations to the United States under the 1944 Water Treaty is no longer sustainable. The threat of a five percent tariff if the demand for 200,000 acre-feet, approximately 247 million cubic meters of water, is not met demonstrates that the country must stop relying on a hurricane to fulfill its treaty obligations, commented Rosario Sánchez, director of the Permanent Forum on Binational Waters .

“This practice of patching potholes with water from here and water from there isn’t going to work for us in the long run. What we see now is going to be like this every year, so there’s no going back, unless a hurricane hits , but depending on hurricanes to solve these kinds of political problems seems very negligent and very risky in the long run,” the researcher said in an interview with El Sol de México.

According to the 1944 International Water Treaty, Mexico is required to deliver 2.158 billion cubic meters of water from the Rio Grande to the United States over a five-year period. However, in the last period, which ran from October 2024 to October 2025, it failed to meet its quota due to drought.

Mexico’s shortage prompted US President Donald Trump to threaten to impose tariffs on Mexican products if our country does not deliver 247 million cubic meters of water before December 31.

Sánchez warned that Mexico must negotiate new water volumes in the treaty based on the availability of basins and population use, a task that will not be easy given the direct pressure from the United States, particularly from senators in Texas, and, on the other hand, the internal conflict in Mexico that could be caused by sending water from Sonora, Tamaulipas or Coahuila , since “giving water to someone in the current situation is taking it away from someone else.”

The researcher, who directs the Binational Basins Program at the Water Resources Institute of Texas A&M University, said that the country is implementing the exceptional drought resource established in the same treaty that allows extending the debt from one five-year cycle to the next, a mechanism that Mexico has taken advantage of in the last 25 years to deliver the third of the tributaries of the Rio Grande that correspond to it in each cycle, that is, with 2,158.6 million cubic meters of water.

Despite complying with this treaty exception, Sánchez warned that the reality of drought in both countries led Washington to demand a quarter of the water debt before the end of 2025, as the Mexican government has been justifying its delay in delivery for at least 15 years.

The water that President Donald Trump is demanding could come from some dams that were included in the treaty in recent years, such as the El Cuchillo Dam, the La Boquilla Dam, or the Conchos River, provided that the governments of Chihuahua, Nuevo León, or Tamaulipas allow it. However, Rosario Sánchez believes that the country needs to make significant structural changes in how it manages water, changes which, she pointed out, are not present in the recently approved General Water Law and National Water Law, which were presented as an initiative to eliminate hoarding and reorganize water concessions.

“As long as Mexico doesn’t make structural changes to its governance systems, which it hasn’t done—it doesn’t dare yet—despite the reform of the Water Law . The only thing the new law did was empower the National Water Commission (CONAGUA), that’s all it did. But other than that, management remains exactly the same,” said Rosario Sánchez.

This October 25th marked the beginning of Cycle 37, which will end in 2030. Mexico’s commitment so far is to deliver more than three thousand cubic meters of water within the next five years. This time, the treaty does not offer the same legal flexibility, as debts cannot be extended over two consecutive cycles.

The director of the Permanent Forum on Binational Waters explained that the Rio Grande basin has lost 80 percent of its natural flow, making the established allocations incompatible with the availability of the resource. She pointed out that the only way out is to follow the example of the Colorado River Basin, where an in-depth study and reassessment of the actual water availability were carried out in order to finally proceed with a fair redistribution and reallocation for all parties.

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