Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has expressed optimism that the current dispute over her country’s compliance with the 1944 Mexican Water Treaty can be resolved without exacerbating bilateral tensions. On Dec. 8, President Donald Trump threatened on Truth Social that he would impose 5% tariffs on Mexican imports unless Mexico delivered 200,000 acre-feet of water to the U.S. by Dec. 31. That treaty established how the two governments divide and manage water from the shared Colorado, Tijuana, and Rio Grande Rivers. It stipulates that Mexico is supposed to deliver 1.7 million acre-feet to the U.S. every five years (about 350,000 acre-feet a year), but over recent years, due largely to severe drought in northern Mexico, it has fallen behind.
Trump fulminates that Mexico’s failure to deliver water is causing great harm to American farmers, in Texas, California, and other Western states, and demands immediate action. The central issue is that neither the policy orientation nor infrastructure necessary to address these water management issues exists in either country. The effects of severe drought in Mexico and the U.S.’s Western states are made worse by the lack of a directed credit policy and commitment to build great projects designed to increase water supplies through the application of advanced technologies for desalinization, nuclear power and irrigation. These include the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) in the U.S. and the PHLINO and PHLIGON megaprojects in Mexico, to guarantee adequate water supplies to the country’s agricultural north and even to the Southwestern U.S.