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Mexico has committed to delivering 431.7 million cubic meters of water a year to the United States under the 1944 Water Treaty — a deal announced last week after sustained pressure from Washington on Mexico who has often delivered significantly as required by the treaty.
The agreement, confirmed by the U.S. State and Agriculture departments, comes after months of negotiation and threats from President Donald Trump to impose higher tariffs on Mexican imports unless Mexico met its water delivery obligations.
In a phone call last month, Trump and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum reportedly agreed to measures to stabilize deliveries and support rural producers on both sides of the border.
President Sheinbaum explained that both sides agreed that the water would be delivered over several months within the framework of the treaty.
“We guarantee human consumption of water in Mexico, as well as part of the irrigation needs, along with a series of infrastructure projects being carried out in the north of the country, particularly irrigation modernization, which allows us to use less water from the Rio Grande to cover farmland in Chihuahua, Coahuila and Tamaulipas,” the president of Mexico told reporters.
Under the treaty, Mexico is expected to deliver an average of 350,000 acre-feet (about 431.7 million cubic meters) annually to the United States over a five-year cycle. While that volume has long been the norm on paper, chronic drought has meant that Mexico has accumulated a “water debt” that U.S. officials estimate at nearly 986 million cubic meters over the last cycle.
What’s new is the urgency: Texas farmers and ranchers in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, a major agricultural region, have reported serious shortages when treaty deliveries lag, forcing costly shifts in irrigation and crop planning — impacts that local agricultural groups link directly to water deficits.
The consequences have led to the disappearance of key industries and massive job losses — nearly 8,400. Water scarcity has led to the permanent closure of the state’s last sugar mill in 2024, ending a 50-year-old industry, and citrus is currently on the brink of a similar fate. Broccoli, celery and cauliflower, high maintenance crops, are being abandoned in favor of cabbage and onions, and dryland crops like sorghum, cotton and corn.
A Texas A&M AgriLife study estimated that the region suffered an economic impact of nearly one billion dollars in 2023 alone.
A shared problem
It’s easy to cast the issue as Mexico “failing to deliver,” but the reality is more complex. The treaty is mutual: the United States is also obligated to send Mexico water from the Colorado River — an even larger share on an annual basis. Both sides face competing domestic demands for water at a time when climate patterns are shifting and reservoirs are stressed.
Northern Mexican states such as Tamaulipas, Chihuahua and Coahuila have been among the hardest hit by multi-year droughts, with farmers delaying planting and communities tightening water conservation. In Chihuahua specifically, where walnut trees grow in the Rio Conchos Valley, the need for irrigation is very high and drought has been so severe that ranchers are forced to leave cattle to die.
Water has shifted from an environmental issue to an economic and competitiveness constraint, as nearshoring-driven industrial growth continues in water-stressed regions. Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, one of the most industrial cities in Mexico, endured a severe drought in 2022.
This two-way dependence reflects a broader truth: water demand flows both ways across the border — and scarce shared water resources mean neither country can meet all of its needs without cooperation.
The World Has Changed Since 1944 — But the Treaty Hasn’t Kept Up
The 1944 Water Treaty was forged in a different era, when the region was less dry and climate models did not yet forecast long-term declines in freshwater systems. In the decades since, water scarcity has moved from periodic stress to structural crisis.
In January 2026, the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health warned that the planet is entering an age of “global water bankruptcy,” noting that more than half of the world’s large lakes are shrinking and around 70 % of major aquifers are in long-term decline. This is not a short-term crisis — it is the result of long-term overuse, population growth, and the intensifying effects of climate change.
In that context, old water sharing frameworks are straining. Claims that Mexico is simply non-compliant overlook the fact that both sides are increasingly competing for diminishing supplies of surface water and groundwater. Since the introduction of NAFTA in 1994, northern Mexico’s border region has experienced steady nearshoring growth, with a sharp acceleration beginning in 2022 as pandemic-related supply chain disruptions and U.S.–China trade tensions reshaped global manufacturing.
In May 2025, U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods climbed to 147.6 per cent, further concentrating production in Mexico’s north—its driest region. Yet prolonged drought in shared basins such as the Colorado River and the Rio Grande has reduced already limited supplies. While agriculture consumes roughly 80 per cent of regional water resources, water-intensive industries including automotive components, electronics, and medical devices cluster along the border, increasing demand for cooling, cleaning, and processing. This convergence is turning water scarcity into a measurable economic constraint, raising the risk of production interruptions, higher operating costs, regulatory exposure, and supply chain instability for companies operating in the region.
Diplomacy, Tariffs, and the USMCA Tie-In
The water deal has rapidly become more than a hydrological problem — it is a diplomatic and economic lever. Trump’s tariff threats linked treaty compliance directly to trade policy, signaling that water delivery disputes could spill into broader negotiations tied to the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA).
While Mexico publicly emphasized cooperation and enforcement of the treaty, U.S. officials framed the agreement as a “win” for American producers and rural communities. The Mexican government stressed that the deal strengthens joint management of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo basin and helps buffer communities on both sides against drought stress.
What remains clear is that water scarcity has become a shared economic and political liability — one that goes beyond the simple language of a 1944 treaty, and toward the hard realities of climate-strained borderlands.
