The Water Chronicles

March 10, 2010

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The North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada the US and Mexico has brought to the forefront several transnational and transborder water issues between the three countries.

Bulk water is not included in the NAFTA agreement unless it is traded as a good or commodified. Canadian environmentalists and legal experts believe that, in fact, bulk water is not protected under NAFTA and that it's only a matter of time before it is treated as a commodity.

As water resources become scarcer and further decrease with global warning, transborder watersheds and aquifers are increasingly vulnerable to binational conflicts.

While transborder water issues between the US and Mexico are longstanding and intensifying around the Colorado and Rio Grande Rivers, Canada/US water disputes are expected to grow around the Great Lakes and prairie watershed areas.

Furthermore, NAFTA’s “Chapter 11” provisions have been used by American businesses to attack environmental and health policies both in Mexico and Canada.

Canada is fortunate to have 20% of the world's freshwater, 7% of which is renewable. Several areas of the US, such as the south-west, are running out of water. Massive bulk water removals and diversions increasingly threaten Canada's ecological and environmental integrity.

Mexico is land of stark contrasts in water supply and use. With the exception of the south of the country which is tropical, the rest is arid and semiarid with large concentrations of urban, industrial and irrigation activities.

When negotiating NAFTA, U.S. and Mexican government officials argued that increased trade and investment would generate wealth needed to clean up the environment. Ten years later, it is clear that NAFTA-related business activity has increased air and water pollution and instead of industrial development becoming more dispersed throughout the country, it intensified along the border, inflicting still more environmental degradation on already heavily-polluted areas.

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