RUBINSTEIN JOINS GROWING ANTI-MEXICO CHORUS FOR WATER

By Juan Montoya
For the past two or three decades, we heard the chorus of Texan politicians and farmers' groups calling on the U.S. Congress to force Mexico to deliver on its 1944 water treaty for the growing thirst of growing Texas populations and agribusiness.
They city the water needs that have grown on this side of the Rio Grande since the pact was reached between both countries 70 years ago.
Both Lucios – Texas Sen. Eddie and his son State Rep. Eddie III – have now been joined by U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela in calling on the International Water and Boundary Commission to take Mexico to task for not delivering the promised water in the treaty.

Now, Carlos Rubinstein, chairman of the Texas water Development Board and former manager of the City of Brownsville is joining the chorus.
Rubinstein, to his credit, doesn't state the visceral reaction that the politicians usually lean on. He cites statistics which show that Texan water users will need an additional 609,906 acre-feet of water by the year 2060, when most of us will have been history. Texas, he says, gets 1,000 more people a day and by that year, there will be an additional 2.3 million in the Valley alone since the 2010 population count.
By then, he says, Texas municipalities will need an additional 16 to 38 percent of all water usage.
Do these fine folks realize that just as one side has grown, so has the other side of the river?
IN those 70 years, the Rio Grande Valley and South Texas has become a vast agribusiness enclave that needed huge amounts of labor that were readily available – and were actively courted – by Texas and U.S. farmers and agricultural producers all the way to the Canadian border.
In fact, the U.S. instituted the Bracero Program (a precursor to the Guest Worker program) to provide agriculture with the labor to offset the manpower drain of the wars. That ballooned the population of Mexican border cities (and increased their  water usage beyond what the treaty writers had envisioned) and created huge pressures on the available liquid.
Add in drought and the creation of in-bond plants (the maquiladoras) with their huge use of water to provide industrial production along the Mexican side of the border for the benefit of American companies, and you have yet another pressure on the available water.
One thing that all these critics of Mexican policy can agree on is that things have changed quite a bit on both sides of the Rio Grande since the treaty was written 70 years ago. It is time to negotiate another treaty and update it to reflect the reality of today taking the needs of both sides into consideration.
To remain myopic on the needs on the U.S. border without considering the effect on the industrialization and population growth on the Mexican side will get us nowhere with our counterparts on the southern side of the river.