Mexico Probably Won’t Deliver All the Water it Owes

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 14:41:29 GMT

Mexico has two months left to deliver almost 1 million acre-feet of water to the U.S., but all that water probably won’t be coming, according to U.S. experts.

“Barring some kind of tropical system, that’s not going to happen,” says Sonny Hinojosa, current water advocate and former general manager at the Hidalgo County Irrigation District No. 2 in San Juan, Texas.

According to the 1944 treaty that governs water sharing between the U.S. and Mexico , Mexico must deliver 1.75 million acre-feet of water from the Rio Grande into Texas every five years. The current cycle ends October 25. As of Aug. 25, it only delivered 747,982 acre-feet , 43% of the total.

“The only thing that can bail Mexico out is a tropical system,” Hinojosa says. “Now, this is a monsoon season in northwest Mexico and west Texas, so we’re still hopeful to get some precipitation, but that still may or may not be enough to get us 100% of the water that we need.”

The deliveries of water from Mexico the the U.S. on the Rio Grande as of Aug. 25, 2025, from the International Boundary and Water Commission.

(Chart from International Boundary and Water Commission)

Hoping for a hurricane

Ideally, Mexico should deliver 350,000 acre-feet of water to the Rio Grande for Texas annually to reach the five-year total of 1.75 million acre-feet. But the 1944 treaty allows deliveries to run on the five-year cycle in the case of extraordinary drought. Mexico has been citing this provision and delivering water later and later in the cycle , often getting into “water debt” by not delivering enough on time.

In the past few cycles, late-cycle hurricanes bumped up deliveries. In the last cycle, which ended on Oct. 24, 2020, Mexico made the total 1.75 million acre-feet in the last days due to a heavy weather event.

The last time Mexico delivered roughly a million-acre feet of water in a couple months — what’s needed now — was at the end of 2010 as a result of Hurricane Alex that hit Mexico in late June.

“That’s the last time our reservoirs were full,” Hinojosa says.

The recent history of water delivery cycles from Mexico to the U.S. on the Rio Grande as recorded by the International Boundary and Water Commission. The mostly-vertical lime green line on the far left of the chart is shows the impact of Hurricane Alex in 2010.

(Chart from the International Boundary and Water Commission)

Alex was a just-in-time hurricane for Texas as well. Hinojosa explains those full reservoirs in late 2010 protected the state’s agriculture while it was deep in drought in 2011 and 2012. But by 2013, the water had again run out.

“It’s horrible to hope for a hurricane, but sometimes it seems to be what we need to get us caught up,” says Troy Allen, general manager of the Delta Lake Irrigation District in Edcouch, Texas.

“We don’t want the devastating ones that kill people,” he adds. “But if we do not get a hurricane this year in the watershed area, it’s going to be very rough come next year.”

Lucas Gregory, associate director and chief science officer of the Texas Water Resources Institute, says the best-case scenario “would be for a system to move pretty far inland and rain up in the mountains, in Chihuahua and the Rio Conchos watershed. That’s upstream of Amistad [International Reservoir], and that’s where the best storage capacity is.”

It’s not just a drought problem

However, there’s far more than drought going on in the situation between Mexico and Texas.

Gregory highlights issues such as growing metro populations on both sides of the Rio Grande and the impacts of climate change as contributing factors.

“But the ability of Mexico to store water in country is improved,” he adds. “They’ve built a lot more reservoirs in more recent history than the U.S. has, so now they can actually hold that water there and use it for themselves.”

Hinojosa says Mexico has built eight reservoirs since the 1944 treaty. Most were built along the Rio Conchos, a major tributary that delivers a lot of water to the Rio Grande — or used to, he says.

“Now they’re capturing it and using all the water for their expanded irrigation,” Gregory adds. “They’re basically irrigating desert with our water.”

Every source The Packer talked to pointed to the expansion of Mexico’s agriculture as a reason the U.S. is not getting the water it’s owed. This is particularly the case in the dry state of Chihuahua, and especially problematic with permanent, water-hungry crops like pecans.

Hinojosa points to the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement as when the problems started.

“It opened the doors for Mexico, mainly Chihuahua, to expand their irrigated agriculture into the desert using water that used to flow into the Rio Grande,” he explains.

“They’re using our water, and I say ‘our water’ because it’s rightfully ours,” he continues. “They’re capturing that water, storing it, using it to grow crops and then bringing them to the U.S. for us. And they’re killing our farmers. They’re killing our market.”

The impact on Texas growers

Since Mexico has only delivered roughly two years’ worth of water over the course of five years, Texas farmers and growers have been in a tough place for a while. Allen explains that his growers have been “on allocation” since April of 2023, while others in neighboring irrigation districts have enforced it since 2022.

“Meaning that they’ve told their farmers they are only going to get X number of irrigations,” he says. He calls the situation unprecedented in his 22 years at the district.

“It’s been very difficult for my farmers,” he adds, saying it is especially “looking pretty scary for the citrus farmers.”

Dante Galeazzi, president and CEO of the Texas International Produce Association, says Texas produce growers in particular are going to have to make some tough decisions.

“What it means this coming season is our growers are going to continue to veer away from water-intensive crops,” he says. “They’re not going to put in broccoli. They’re not going to put in celery. They’re probably not going to take a lot of chances on new commodities. They’re going to double down on what they know works.”

Those produce standbys will likely be crops like cabbage, onions, carrots and established citrus like oranges and grapefruit, he says. But the potential loss of produce diversity comes with its own problems.

“The diversity, the variety, the trying new things — that’s what has always helped South Texas be a region that provides commercial volumes of fresh fruits and vegetables,” Galeazzi stresses. But, without assurances about water availability, growers will likely stay in the safe lane, he adds.

“The safe lane is great, but the safe lane isn’t always profitable, and that’s challenging because now you’re coming off of two years where profits have been cut into if there’s even profits. And now, you’re about to go into year three of pretty similar conditions. It’s gut wrenching.”

What’s likely to happen in the next two months

Though Texas probably won’t get the full volume of water owed by Mexico, it will likely get some additional water this cycle. It might even amount to more than the usual annual delivery.

In an agreement signed between the U.S. State Department and Mexico in late April , Mexico pledged to deliver 324,000 to 420,000 acre-feet between the signing and October. That’s roughly a year’s worth of water delivered in five months. These deliveries are on top of the 110,000 acre-feet Mexico had delivered since the start of the current water year that started Oct. 25, 2024 and late April 2025.

If realized, the April agreement will bring the total deliveries for the current water year to 434,000 to 530,000 acre-feet, and the total five-year cycle deliveries between 854,000 and 950,000 acre-feet.

“Mexico has delivered 60.8% of the minimum that they said they would, so they’re on target to deliver this minimum of 324,000 acre feet,” Hinojosa says. “By the time this current cycle ends, it still leaves them with a deficit, but nonetheless, it has brought us some water in in recent history.”

Hinojosa praises the current administration for putting pressure on Mexico to achieve the April agreement that actually seems to be happening.

“I’ve been in this business for 38 years, and I’ve never known Mexico to do anything voluntarily before a cycle ends,” he says. “There’s a lot of pressure being put on Mexico, and that’s why they made these targets of delivering water to the U.S. before this current cycle ends.”

Needs for the future

More pressure is going to be needed to prevent this situation from repeating in the future, sources say.

“[Our administration is] going to have to implement something that puts pressure on Mexico that’s not tied to water,” Allen opines. That might mean tariffs or inclusion into the USMCA renegotiation, but whatever it is, it needs to spur Mexico to make good on their delivery requirements.

“Mexico could have fulfilled and caught up to what they owed us in 2022 because their reservoirs were full. They had a little over 3 million acre-feet in storage, and they still were over a year behind at that point in time,” Allen says. “But they didn’t deliver any of that water to the U.S.”

Hinojosa says a mindset change is needed in Mexico.

“We need Mexico to treat us, the United States, as we treat them on the Colorado River,” he says. The same 1944 treaty that dictate’s Mexico’s water deliveries to the U.S. on the Rio Grande also dictates the U.S.’s deliveries of water to Mexico on the Colorado River.

He says the U.S. takes Mexico’s allocation “off the top” of the available water in the Colorado River, then divides the rest among the seven U.S. states that rely on it. But Mexico does not return the favor, he adds.

“That has to change,” Hinojosa says. “Mexico needs to recognize that the treaty calls for a minimum delivery to United States of 350,000 acre-feet per year — that’s a minimum delivery — and they need to set that water aside and deliver that water to United States.”

Galeazzi also advocates for a mindset change here in the U.S. around not only Texas’ water issues with Mexico, but all of the country’s water issues. He describes the U.S. as having put water infrastructure on the back burner, adding that the country has “hamstrung ourselves” with excessive and burdensome regulations.

“We absolutely need to pressure Mexico,” he says. “But, if we want to prevent this from happening, the other thing we have to do is we — as a region, a state and a country — need to get serious and make some very big investments in the infrastructure of water.”

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Texas International Produce Assn.