Mexico reached a deal with the United States to cover the water delivery shortfall, days after Donald Trump threatened to impose 5% tariffs if the Water Treaty was not respected. This Friday, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) published a joint statement with the United States in which it announced the gradual shipment of 249 million cubic meters of water, the quantity that the president demanded from his southern neighbor before the end of the year. Shipments will begin on Monday and the deadline to finalize what has been agreed is extended until January 31.
In the statement, Mexico recognizes its deficit with the United States, where agricultural businessmen, the governor of Texas and the president himself claim a deficit of more than 986 million cubic meters. “A series of actions were reviewed to meet Treaty obligations, including timely compensation for the exceptional deficit from the previous water cycle, in accordance with the 1944 Water Treaty,” SRE reported.
The two countries reached an agreement after revising the treaty and will continue negotiations to finalize a new plan before January 31. This commitment comes after multiple warnings from the Republican president, who even published on his social network that Mexico was “stealing” water from Texas farmers.
The Sheinbaum government declared in April that it was impossible to respect the treaty which obliges Mexico to give its neighbor 2.185 million cubic meters of the Rio Grande, which divides the two countries. The reasons for this were the drought in states like Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas, which affected farmers and ranchers.
Across the border, the complaints in the sector were the same. Protests that escalated from the small fields of Texas to the White House itself. “I will ensure that Mexico does not violate our treaties and harm our Texas farmers. … We will continue to escalate consequences, including tariffs and perhaps even sanctions, until Mexico complies,” Trump wrote in Truth Social in April.
The Sheinbaum administration has pledged to begin paying off that water debt starting next Monday. At the same time, Mexican farmers have been protesting for months, even around Congress, against the water law proposed by the president and approved on December 4.
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