Blue Planet Project campaigner Meera Karunananthan speaking at last night’s public forum. Twitter photo by Phil Soubliere.
The Council of Canadians Ottawa chapter hosted a public forum last night on the water crisis in San Miguel de Allende featuring Blue Planet Project campaigner Meera Karunananthan.
San Miguel de Allende is a municipality located in the eastern part of the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico.
Mexico faces increasing water scarcity, the over-exploitation of freshwater resources and deteriorating water quality. Water supplies have been diminishing dramatically in Mexico and water availability is expected to drop another 75 per cent over the next 15 years. In Mexico some 170 aquifers are now being over-exploited, a number that is expected to double over the next five years.
Central Mexico, where San Miguel de Allende is situated, is under heavy water stress. Eighty per cent of Mexico’s population lives in central and northern Mexico, while less than 20 per cent of its water is in that region. Water stress in Guanajuato has been attributed mostly due to demographic pressure, but also to a large dam, a thermo-electric generation plant, the heavy petrochemical industry, leather products manufacturing, and intensive agriculture.
The New York Times reports, “The farms in Guanajuato count as one of the great success stories of [the economic model that puts pressure on people and nature], 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. 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. 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.”
Last night’s public forum also featured Mario Arturo Hernández Peña, the director of the Botanical Garden, speaking – via Skype – about the water crisis. The Botanical Garden, a 170-acre botanical garden set in an ecological preserve situated near San Miguel de Allende, supports the Declaration of Charco del Ingenio which has been signed by members of the general public, scientists, environmentalists, farmers and organizations. That declaration summarizes the dire water situation, emphasizes the impact of increasing pollution in both the aquifer and shallow channels, criticizes the unsustainable extractive model, and calls for the implementation of the human right to water.
And Gloria Tobon, a Mexican scientist, also joined via Skype. Tobon, an expert on the topic of water, lives in in Saltillo which is the capital and largest city of the northeastern Mexican state of Coahuila.
Despite all this, federal and state authorities in Mexico have not acknowledged the water crisis in Guanajuato.
