Fresh water is about as scarce as it’s ever been in the Rio Grande Valley.
Water levels in the Rio Grande itself, as well as reservoirs along the border, are nearing historic lows. And there are many hot, rainless days still left on the calendar.
The RGV has faced droughts before, but this one could have particularly dire consequences. Earlier this year, the state’s only sugar mill closed because of a lack of water in South Texas. Citrus and cotton farmers are getting nervous, too.
Jude Benavides specializes in water resource analysis and is a professor in the School of Earth, Environmental, and Marine sciences at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. He spoke to the Texas Standard about how local governments are dealing with the drought.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Why has this been such an extraordinary year for water shortages from the Rio Grande?
Jude Benavides: Well, it’s an interesting question. Like you said, we’ve faced droughts before. This one’s rather intense, and it’s kind of caught people by surprise, I think, number one.
Number two, I think it’s an era of new information. We share information a lot faster than ever before. Things are becoming a little bit more transparent as far as big data management. And people are, I think, a little bit more aware of water situations in different places of what you call their watershed, and that might be playing a role.
It’s also the increased population in the valley in northeastern Mexico that’s putting greater pressures on municipal water supplies, which in reality makes people a little bit more nervous than when we have an issue with agricultural water supplies.
As I understand it – and certainly this has come up in many conversations here on the Standard – part of what seems to be fueling this shortage is that Mexico hasn’t kept up with its treaty obligations that require them to send a certain amount of water to the U.S. through the Rio Grande each year.
They’ve been sort of delaying and waiting until the end of that, I believe it’s a three-year period, to make good on their treaty obligations. Why is Mexico running behind?
You know, an expert in international relations will probably answer that question a little better. But it comes down to a poorly worded treaty from decades ago.
The treaty gives a lot of wiggle room for both countries to declare a drought situation without really truly defining those drought parameters. And I think that has really made enforcement and/or understanding of that treaty from both the political perspective and even the layperson’s perspective difficult.
And when you give somebody room to operate and maneuver within the wordings of that treaty, give an interpretation, that’s going to happen. We see that happen in courtrooms all the time, and we see that happen in, even technical, interpretations. So I think that’s really what’s being a major factor here.
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I know some Texas members of Congress, including John Cornyn in the Senate, are talking about trying to tie Mexico’s response to its treaty obligations to continued aid funding. But I’m curious about what this means for local governments: How have they tried to protect their water supply? What can they do?
There’s two major things I’d like to talk about here: One is is diversifying our water supply. You know, you can think about water shortages and water resources – it’s not rocket science. Water flows downhill, right? It’s the basic principle increasing your water supply.
We need to diversify our water supply away from the Rio Grande River. And that includes desalination. Ocean desal is very expensive, and it’s very difficult to deal with as far as the discharging brine. But groundwater, we are blessed with living on top of the Gulf Coast aquifer. And our groundwater, though mildly brackish, meaning a little bit salty, is actually only about 10% as salty as the ocean.
And the city of Brownsville and the Brownsville Public Utilities Board, through the Southmost Regional Water Authority, has led the way in that effort in the Valley as far as building one of the state’s largest brackish groundwater desalination plants, which has enabled the city of Brownsville to lower its dependency on the Rio Grande River from almost 100% a few decades ago to just about 60% now. And they’re planning on expanding that one the next few years. That’s a great resource we need to take advantage of.
And number two – the dreaded word that people don’t like to hear and politicians don’t like to use – is conservation. We need to be smarter about the water we’re using, and we need to realize that we live in a very water stressed watershed, that’s probably one of the most water stressed watersheds in the world. And we like to sometimes play, work and live like we’re not. And that’s the reality of it.
I think that those words sort of speak to the issue facing a lot of orange and grapefruit growers, for example. How are they trying to deal with the lack of conservation and the fact that the infrastructure just isn’t where it needs to be to support a lot of this citrus growth?
Exactly, exactly. And that comes down to us being in deep South Texas. I think there’s a lot of lack of awareness of the importance that this region of the country plays agriculturally. Like in many other sectors, we don’t get a lot of attention sometimes. And I think that attention needs to be raised, both at the state and federal level.
And I think some local politicians have done a great job trying to help out farmers and raising that attention. But we need some serious infrastructure investment if we want this agricultural sector to continue its proud and very important tradition of serving a very important niche in the agricultural role within the United States and around the globe.
We’ve seen how devastating this has been for sugar in Texas. Is there a similar danger right now, from what you can tell, to the citrus industry?
You know, that’s not really my area of expertise as far as saying what agricultural experts can; we have others that can answer that a little bit better.
But from the perspective of history and my understanding of water resources, absolutely. Things get quickly get more dire if you don’t handle that situation of enhancing or diversifying your supply and doing more with less. And if we can’t figure out those two basic questions – like I said, it’s not rocket science – we’re going to be in a world of hurt.
And usually the biggest water users, the agricultural sectors – and the most inefficient through their infrastructure; it’s not the farmers’ fault – are going to be the ones that pay the price first.
