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 Editorials | At Issue | May 2005 
The Latino Face of America
 Alan Caruba - The National Anxiety Center
| | In Mexico City everyone agrees that the water deficit is a time bomb. There is less agreement about when the bomb will go off. |
Growing demand and falling supply are a surefire formula for higher prices in just about any market. If the product is in danger of running out completely, the price heads for the stratosphere.
If for some reason the price remains unchanged, people will continue to use and even waste the product, especially if it is sold below cost.
That absurd scenario is being played out with Mexico's dwindling supply of potable water. Water scarcity creates a complicated political and economic challenge because it is no ordinary product.
Huge quantities are essential to agriculture and industry. In Mexico 80 percent of the managed water is consumed by agriculture and another 10 percent by industry.
Unlike other commodities water is also essential to life itself. It would be a travesty to the public interest to treat it purely as a market commodity. So, for better or worse, the sole seller of the stuff that comes out of the tap is usually the municipal government.
That's not to say that water policy in Mexico is consistent or prudent. In fact, it's been neglected for decades, and until recently was based on an outmoded assumption that the well would never run dry.
Today the apocalyptic forecasts about the future of Mexico's water supply are well known.
In Mexico City everyone agrees that the water deficit — the excess consumed above aquifer regeneration through the city's meter-a-year average rainfall — is a time bomb. There is less agreement about when the bomb will go off.
If the trend continues, severe shortages will appear in Mexico City within 10 to 25 years, depending on whose hydrological study you believe. Some politicians prefer to think it will take longer, while consumers in the delegation of Iztapalapa, with an existing shortfall of 2,000 cubic meters per second, would argue that the time has already arrived.
The coming water crisis is not only a Mexico City problem, although with a quarter of the nation's population squeezed into a small area, it's arguably the most crucial. Aquifers all over Mexico, especially in the north, are running dry.
On the surface, this would seem to call for a simple exercise in conservation of an ever-scarcer resource. Raise the price, provide incentives for conservation practices, and update the aging pipeline system.
Oh, that it should be so simple!
The first problem is political: municipal administrations change hands every three years, so the water department is almost continuously headed by uninformed newcomers.
The infrastructure is in an advanced state of decay. Some water pipelines in the city center were installed during the era of Porfirio Díaz, and others have been in place since the 1930s when Lázaro Cárdenas was president. These ancient pipes lose about one-third of the water that passes through them.
Financing pipeline renewal is a huge headache. For political and social reasons, the charge to consumers is nowhere near the cost of delivering it, even without factoring in pipeline replacement.
The electricity required for filtering, treating, and pumping water costs more than three pesos per cubic meter. Many consumers pay less than that and their prodigal consumption practices reflect that reality.
Collection policies are in such disarray that many consumers do not even pay the water bill.
In Mexico City revenues from water consumption are about 3 billion pesos per year, while the budget for providing it is closer to 7 billion.
In some parts of the city there's an even more basic problem: an estimated 180,000 residents still do not have running water.
Nor will these problems correct themselves. The pipes aren't getting any younger. The population is growing more slowly than in the past, but as living standards rise so does water consumption.
In an era of tight budgets governments cannot throw money at the problem, even though it is increasingly urgent to replace those ancient leaky pipes. They can make a deal with the private sector, and that's been done in Monterrey and five delegations in the capital.
Still, the situation is far from hopeless. Water policy may not fit comfortably with the “free market” concept, but some consumer incentives can be applied.
A cost-recovery program for families that replace leaky toilets with water-efficient ones and free washers to tighten leaky faucets would save millions of liters of water a day.
Municipalities could take advantage of the current housing boom and provide for future conservation by offering subsidies to builders who install water recycling equipment in new apartment blocks and housing developments.
Together, municipal and federal governments could offer incentive grants to some of the thirstiest industries to relocate in southern Mexico, a region with plentiful water and a crying need for jobs.
Water rates that at least come closer to reflecting the true cost of delivery and better collection methods would relieve the cash shortfall, and a public education campaign would spur conservation.
Water is not a typical market commodity and cannot be treated as such. Even so, sensible measures to control wastage and show consumers that water conservation need not be painful would go far toward staving off the day when even desperation measures will have limited effect.
Kenneth Emmond is a freelance journalist and economist who has lived in Mexico since 1995. Kemmond00@yahoo.com |
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