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NY Times, May 20 2016
Prosperous Mexican Farms Suck Up Water, Leaving Villages High and Dry
By ELISABETH MALKIN
SAN ANTONIO DE LOURDES, Mexico — In the dappled shade of mesquite trees
by the side of a pale yellow schoolhouse, the children finished a song
and waited for the priest’s blessing.
The Rev. Juan Carlos Zesati began with a gentle exhortation, citing Pope
Francis. “Water is part of God’s creation,” he said as he traced the
connection from God to the earth, to life, to community and ultimately
to every individual. “We have to respect that connection.”
But the well in San Antonio de Lourdes, a village in Guanajuato State in
central Mexico, went dry years ago. The village itself, depleted by
poverty and migration, seems to be drying up, too, and only 29 children
are left in the primary school. But a half-hour’s drive away, fertile
farms pump water from deep underground to irrigate fields that grow
broccoli and lettuce for American supermarkets.
“Your communities are suffering,” Father Zesati told a group of mothers
and children before delivering his indictment. It is the farms that “are
sucking up the water — but just for themselves.”
Then he turned to face a whitewashed water tank, built by the people of
San Antonio de Lourdes to collect rainwater from the school roof, raised
his right hand, and blessed it. “This seems small for all the problems
there are — but it’s a sign of hope.”
It was the first of a day of such blessings in a hilly arid pocket of
central Mexico where farmers wait for rain to bring subsistence crops of
corn and beans to life.
When Father Zesati arrived in northern Guanajuato four years ago, he
quickly learned that he was at the heart of a water crisis, one that is
playing out over much of agricultural Mexico.
“What the pope emphasizes is that those who most suffer from the
pressure on the earth and from ecological destruction — the first who
suffer its effects are the poor,” Father Zesati said. “They are made
poor by those who follow an economic model that throws its costs at them.”
The farms in Guanajuato count as one of the great success stories of
that model, codified in the North American Free Trade Agreement, or
Nafta. Every day, workers stack crates of fresh produce aboard giant
refrigerated trucks that roar straight to the Texas border.
“Nafta is all about high-intensive-labor crops,” said Dylan Terrell, the
director of Caminos de Agua, an organization that works with
universities in the United States to test water quality in the
Guanajuato wells, and designs and pays for cisterns and other methods to
collect clean drinking water.
As far back as the 1980s, even before the free trade agreement, the
government imposed a ban on most new wells in Guanajuato. But water
extraction increased exponentially. What allowed that to happen is “a
pretty well-known system of bribes and corruption,” Mr. Terrell said.
Every year, farms bore farther into the aquifer, and scientists warn
that as they go deeper they are reaching tainted water deposited between
10,000 and 35,000 years ago.
“Here is the challenge for the authorities,” said Marcos Adrián Ortega
Guerrero, a hydrogeologist at the National Autonomous University of
Mexico. “It is to administer water that is thousands of years old, water
that is contaminated with arsenic and fluoride which is causing great
harm and that they have never wanted to acknowledge.”
The signs of tainted water seem apparent. The most visible evidence is
the prevalence of dental fluorosis, an illness that blackens teeth. Yet
the many complaints of joint pain suggest that some people might have
developed a much more severe illness, skeletal fluorosis, which occurs
when fluoride accumulates in the bones.
“My husband can’t bear the pain in his feet,” said Guadalupe Mata, 39, a
mother of three in Rancho Nuevo, the second village on Father Zesati’s
route of cistern blessings. “He gets injections, but the pain just comes
back. But he still goes to work in the fields to plant chile.”
Her 16-year-old daughter has been hospitalized for kidney trouble, she
said. Buying bottled water is far beyond the family’s means; her husband
earns about $33 a week.
There have been no formal studies of the effect on health caused by
excess arsenic and fluoride in the community wells of Guanajuato, but
recent tests carried out by Northern Illinois University for Caminos de
Agua show levels that are many times higher than levels recommended by
the World Health Organization.
According to the W.H.O., long-term exposure to arsenic at those levels
can cause skin, lung and other cancers, and can have neurological and
cardiovascular effects. Along with dental and skeletal fluorosis, excess
fluoride may exacerbate renal illness, the organization said.
Three people have died of kidney disease since Father Zesati arrived,
and now he fears for Gloria Villanueva Rodríguez, whose kidneys failed a
year ago. Three sons left to join three more who were already working in
the United States and who send money to pay for her dialysis treatments.
“They are working to cure me,” said Mrs. Villanueva, 51.
Few question that Guanajuato’s water supply is under acute pressure.
Farms account for about 82 percent of all water use and do not have to
pay for it.
“The available studies are more than enough to state that the aquifers
are subject to destructive overexploitation,” Víctor Hugo Alcocer
Yamanaka, the technical subdirector for the National Water Commission,
or Conagua, wrote in response to questions.
He denied allegations that Conagua, which has only 10 inspectors for the
entire state, had granted illegal water concessions.
Dr. Alcocer also confirmed that excess levels of fluoride had been
detected in a number of sites in the northern part of the state, and
both fluoride and arsenic had been found in a smaller group of sites.
“We have to support growth,” said Roberto Castañeda, the agriculture
under secretary for Guanajuato State. To save water, he said, “we have
to be much more intensive in applying the law, in bringing technology to
the countryside and improving efficiency.”
Alvaro Nieto, a farmer who sells broccoli, lettuce, kale and brussels
sprouts to California distributors, said most Guanajuato farmers were
uninterested in conservation. And the government has been unwilling to
crack down on illegal wells and overpumping, he added.
Mr. Nieto said he had cut water consumption to 40 percent of what it was
two decades ago by using soil conservation techniques. “I don’t pump
more water because I want my business to last many generations,” he
said. “We are many people all drinking with many straws from the same
glass.”
Jaime Hoogesteger, a researcher at Wageningen University in the
Netherlands who has studied Guanajuato’s water problem, predicted that
the agricultural boom would eventually use up all the water that feeds
it. “The question is how long it will take,” he said.
As evening approached, Father Zesati blessed another cistern to the
bleating of sheep at the home of an older couple, Teresita Aguilar and
Gabriel Padrón. They, along with a dozen relatives and friends, raised
their right hands.
Then someone said: “Now we just have to wait for it to rain, a lot.”
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