México and the US

Source: The Economist

In early February 1848, following a short and one-sided war, México agreed to cede more than half its territory to the United States. An area covering most of present-day Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah, plus parts of several other states, was handed over to the US. 

The rebellious state of Tejas, which had declared its independence from México in 1836, was recognised as American soil too. 

But a century and a half later, communities have proved more durable than borders. The counties with the highest concentration of Mexicans (as defined by ethnicity, rather than citizenship) overlap closely with the area that belonged to México before the great US land-grab of 1848. Some are recent arrivals; others trace their roots to long before the map was redrawn. They didn’t jump the border—it jumped them.

Global Water Reserves in 21st Century

Map of Global Aquifiers in the 21st Century

Researchers at McGill and Utrecht University in the Netherlands have recently published a map showing the regions where the use of water from these aquifers vastly exceeds the rate at which they're being refilled by rain. 

The map compares the usage footprint with the actual rainfall a particular aquifer gets. Blue areas receive more rain than is being used up by humans. For example, Russia has plenty of freshwater. But orange or red areas indicate places where irrigation and drinking water use is drawing out more water from the aquifers than the rain can refill.

Water is limited
 
Nature has decreed that the supply of water is fixed. Meanwhile demand rises inexorably as the world's population increases and enriches itself. Homes, factories and offices are sucking up ever more. But it is the planet's growing need for food (and the water involved in producing crops and meat) that matters most. Farming accounts for 70% of withdrawals.

Few of the world's great rivers that run through grain-growing areas now reach the sea all the year round or, if they do, they do so as a trickle. Less obvious, though even more serious, are the withdrawals from underground aquifers, which are hidden from sight but big enough to produce changes in the Earth's gravitational field that can be monitored by NASA's satellites in space. Water tables are now falling in many parts of the world, including America, India and China.

But there are many potential solutions
 
Although the supply of water cannot be increased, we can use what there is better—in four ways. One is through the improvement of storage and delivery, by creating underground reservoirs, replacing leaking pipes, lining earth-bottomed canals, irrigating plants at their roots with just the right amount of water, and so on. A second route focuses on making farming less thirsty—for instance by growing newly bred, perhaps genetically modified, crops that are drought-resistant or higher-yielding. A third way is to invest in technologies to take the salt out of sea water and thus increase supply of the fresh stuff. The fourth is of a different kind: unleash the market on water-users and let the price mechanism bring supply and demand into balance. And once water is properly priced, trade will encourage well-watered countries to make water-intensive goods, and arid ones to make those that are water-light. It is too early to tell how we will decide to manage our global water reserves. 

Water in the 21st Century

Water is a common pool resource in the 21st Century

From the water wars and the pumping races in California in the 1950s to irrigation systems in Spain and mountain villages in Switzerland, all have demonstrated that people are able to draw up sensible rules for the use of common-pool resources like water. Water in the 21st century will increasingly need its own set of sensible rules to meet the new political, economic and environmental realities of the 21st century.

The Colorado River in the US

The Colorado River provides much of the water for many cities and farms in seven states in the US including Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and California before it reaches México. But flows of water on the Colorado River in the US have been forecast to decrease by up to 30pc by 2050. In the Northern States its water supports cattle empires. In the Southern States especially in California, the river irrigates deserts to produce much of the US' agricultural products, fruit and winter vegetables. And all along the way, aqueducts branch off to supply cities from Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix and Los Angeles. Interestingly, the Metropolis closest to Lake Mead, Las Vegas, gets 90pc of its water from this one source. 

Map of Colorado River in US West

Arguments over water tend to have four dimensions – physical, legal, political and cultural. For the physical the standard response is to summon the engineers. In the case of the Colorado River, engineers are already digging a new intake at 890 feet (lower than the current intakes as the water level in Lake Mead has decreased to ensure a guaranteed water supply to Las Vegas). Another response is to call in the lawyers. This was the preferred approach in the 20th century, in the era of the so called “water wars”. Starting with the the Colorado River Compact of 1922 and continuing with statutes, a treaty with México and case law until the 1960s, a truce was achieved. Called the Law of the River, the resulting regime determines who along the river has what right to how much water. 

At least, it does in theory. The problem is that the law took shape after two decades of record water flows, which became the basis for allocation. As a result it apportions more water than there is in the river. For decades that did not matter, since there was so few people. Then the cattle, fruit and people multiplied. The law's seniority rules theoretically mean that, for example, the taps to Las Vegas would be shut completely before agriculture in California were to loose a drop of water. This gives rise to the political dimension.

In the 21st century, cooperation has mostly replaced the old rivalries among agricultural and urban users among the seven river states. Nevada and Arizona have a water banking partnership and Arizona stores excess water in its aquifers to share with Nevada if needed. In California, the water utility of Los Angeles has bought water rights from some farmers. But inevitably arguments still persist. 

This leads into the final dimension which is the cultural dimension. The argument here is directly related to the culture of the US West. For example, does every middle-class household really need a lawn in a desert? In some cases, counties have begun paying their citizens to rip out their turf and opt for a desert landscape garden instead that can be just as chic. 

Egypt and Ethiopia are fighting for the Nile's water too

Most of the water that flows down the lower reaches of the Nile, the world's longest river, comes from the Ethiopian highlands. Up until recently the Ethiopian Government had been content to abide by a Nile River Water Treaty negotiated in 1959. The trouble is the current treaty has strongly favoured the biggest and most influential consumer of Nile water, Egypt. Ethiopia, which has recently overtaken Egypt as Africa's second-most populous nation has joined together with the other upstream Nile nations including Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda to re-write the 1959 Nile River Water treaty taking advantage of the power vaccuum in Egypt's leadership after the Arab Spring. 

The combined population of the upstream countries along the Nile is 240m against Egypt (85m) and Sudan (30m) and South Sudan (14m). There are also plans afoot for Ethiopia to dam its bit of the Blue Nile and to build a large hydro-power capacity that would be the centrepiece of a plan to increase the country's electricity supply five fold over the next five years. These plans will undoubtedly have a big impact on other Nile countries downstream and have the potential to provoke cross-border water conflicts.

 And what about fracking and high water use it requires

In order to extract gas held in the hard shale rock, it is necessary to break up small sections by firing large quantities of water mixed with fine sand and fracking chemicals at a very high pressure to make the shale rock give up its gas. Water has been identified as a serious problem for mining shale gas mainly because of the quantities of it that are needed to successfully frack wells. But worse of all there have already been cases where local ground water aquifiers have been polluted by the harsh chemicals used in the fracking process. It is estimated that the average shale well uses around of 22m litres of water to extract the gas. If as predicted by many energy experts, shale gas extraction goes ahead at full speed, worldwide gas could make up around 25pc of primary energy by 2035 adding further pressure to the common pool resource of water.

So what does the future hold

The Geo-Trade Blog believes there is an increasing awareness of the need to act on the world’s impending water challenge in the 21st Century. Nevertheless growing global resource use highlights the complex interdependencies between water and energy, agriculture, industry, urban growth and ecosystems.

Governments and business need to prepare for long term water scarcity and to consider a framework to share the world's water - a common pool resource. Of particular importance are the challenges to addressing water issues at policy level nationally and internationally, to avoid cross-border water conflict. The Geo-Trade Blog believes that people do have the capacity to  draw up sensible rules for water use in the 21st Century but consideration needs to start now.

A New Wall on the US-Mexico Border, for what purpose?

 

A recently constructed section of the US-Mexico Border Wall between Yuma, Arizona
and Calexico, California. The new barrier between the US and Mexico stands 15 feet tall
and sits on top of the sand so it can be lifted by a machine and repositioned whenever the
 migrating desert dunes begin to bury it.

Since 2005 the US Government has been building a US-Mexico Border Wall. The US-Mexican border follows the Rio Bravo through the rough terrain of the Big Bend and through the once busy trading posts of Presidio/Ojinaga and on to the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez twin cities (on each side of the border) established as the "Passage to the North" between the mountain ranges, from there, the river gives way to the new wall.

The primary purpose of the Great Wall of China was not to keep out people, who could scale the Wall, but to insure that semi-nomadic people on the outside of the Wall could not cross with their horses or return easily with stolen property.

The Great Wall of China

Borders and Walls

A border marks the place where adjacent jurisdictions meet. This combined conjunction and separation of national laws and customs creates a zone in which movements of people and goods are greatly regulated, highly examined and sometimes hidden. Commerce attains a higher importance on both sides of the border. Smuggling, legal and illegal immigration, add to a picture of accentuated concern with the trade in goods and the flow of people.

The border is an environment of opportunity. Individuals find work enforcing or avoiding the laws that regulate movement and goods. Companies use national differences in labour and regulations to pursue their advantage. Borders thrive on difference and people and institutions come there to exploit niches.

The New US-Mexico Border Wall

By building a wall along the border, the psychological barrier between two different jurisdictions is physically manifest as a structure that seeks to distinguish and separate the two sides.

The US-Mexico border has frequently been transited in history for the mutual advantage of both countries. For example, during the Second World War, when the US was badly lacking in labour, it  launched a programme to encourage large migrations of Mexican workers to the US to work legally as contract labourers for seasonal work. In more recent times, since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) labour unions of Mexican farmers, service employees, and oil workers now organise maquiladora workers at the assembly plants on the Mexican side of the border.

What purpose does the wall serve?

 

Diagram of US proposed enforcement of the “Virtual Wall”

The Obama administration has been under intense pressure to beef up security on the border to prevent the recent increase in drug-related violence in Mexico spilling into the US. One of the ways to do this was through "virtual policing" of the wall by lining the border between the US and Mexico with cameras and radar towers as shown in the diagram above. This was supposed to be a cost effective way of policing the wall.

However, in February 2011, the Obama administration finally pulled the plug on what was known as the "Virtual Wall". After spending more than $1 billion on the scheme, the US Department of Homeland Security was forced to admit that it was a "complete failure". But building of the physical wall still continues. Since 2005, the Wall covers around half of the 2000-mile US-Mexico border.

Even so, it is not clear what purpose the wall serves. It can be easily scaled within 20 seconds by a person as shown in YouTube videos. The US Government (without cameras and radar) will not have the resources to police all 2,000-miles of the Border Wall. Earlier on this year there were reports that people were using medieval catapults to thwart it. Smugglers trying to get their goods across the wall were trying a new approach – a medieval tribuchet catapult installed on a flatbed towed by a sports utility vehicle to launch projectiles across the new wall. This only serves to illustrate that human innovation will not be stifled by a wall. People will constantly seek out new ways for goods and people to go under, over and around it.

The US-Mexico Border Wall seems to lack a clear purpose compared with the Great Wall of China which was built with a clear primary purpose, to ensure those outside could not easily cross and get back across with stolen property. In the 21st century, the US and Mexico's economies are highly dependent on each other. They are not enemies where one is stealing from the other. Instead, they are trading partners within NAFTA. Mexico sends the lion's share of its exports to the US. Mexico is the second-largest export market for the US and it is the US' third-largest trading partner. Mexico also supplies US companies with much human capital both within Mexican borders and across the border in neighbouring US states. It would appear that erecting a wall has more to do with an 'imagined fear' than a real need to protect against maruading intruders from the South.