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By Root 1482 0

the salinity of the Colorado River shot up from around eight hundred to more than fifteen hundred parts per million. The Mexicali region is the most productive in the entire country, which suffers not only from frightening population growth but from a woefully archaic, unbalanced, and inefficient agricultural sector. All the irrigation around Mexicali is utterly dependent on the river. Only a well-managed irrigation system, which the Mexicans did not have, could tolerate such levels of salt, and even then under some duress. Predictably, crop yields went into abject decline. The Mexicans were all the more incensed because the United States seemed so unconcerned about their plight. We had promised them 1.5 million acre-feet of water a year, which they were still getting. The Compact, U.S. officials pointed out, contained no guarantees about water quality, as long as there was enough. President Luis Echeverria campaigned heavily on the issue, and, after winning the election, threatened to keep his promise to haul the United States before the World Court at The Hague. In 1973, for reasons which are still obscure—but which might conceivably have had something to do with the fact that Mexico showed some promise of owning a great deal of oil—President Richard Nixon appointed a former U.S. Attorney General, Herbert Brownell, to work out a hasty solution. Signed six months later, in August of 1974, the agreement, known as Minute 242, calls for the United States to deliver Mexico water whose salt content is not more than 115 parts per million (plus or minus thirty ppm) higher than measured levels at Imperial Dam in 1976—a level that turned out to be 879 parts per million. As a result, salinity levels at the border of a thousand ppm or above—and they have almost reached such levels—are a violation of international law.

The simplest and cheapest way to solve Mexico’s salinity crisis would have been for the U.S. government to buy out the Wellton-Mohawk farmers and retire their lands. Even today, a generous settlement probably would not cost more than a couple of hundred million dollars, and a tremendous source of salts would be removed. Retiring some additional irrigated lands in the Grand Valley of Colorado, another prodigious source of salts, would be further insurance against the problem getting out of hand. None of this has, of course, happened. The solution of choice at Wellton-Mohawk has been the construction of a reverse-osmosis desalination plant—ten times larger than any in the world—which, while consuming enough electricity to satisfy a city of forty thousand people, will treat the wastewater running out the drain canal. The solution of choice in the Grand Valley is at least as expensive but more prosaic—lining irrigation canals to prevent seepage through subsurface salt zones is the main one. The legislation authorizing all of these works belongs in a class of Congressional sacred cows—whatever it costs to keep salinity levels down without retiring an acre of salt-ridden land is what Congress is willing to spend. The Yuma plant is now supposed to cost $293 million, a figure hardly anyone outside the Bureau believes, and the upper-basin works could cost another $600 million, perhaps much more. Energy costs could easily push the Yuma plant’s cost to $1 billion or more over fifty years.

What Congress has chosen to do, in effect, is purify water at a cost exceeding $300 an acre-foot so that upriver irrigators can continue to grow surplus crops with federally subsidized water that costs them $3.50 an acre-foot.

“If the farmers at Wellton-Mohawk adopted efficient irrigation methods,” says Jan van Schilfgaarde, “you could solve the problem without even retiring the lands. It would be quite possible to reduce their return flows from 220,000 acre-feet a year to 45,000 acre-feet. I’m not even talking about installing drip irrigation. I’m talking about laser-leveling fields and reusing water on salt-tolerant crops and not doing stupid things like irrigating at harvest time, which our neighboring farmer in the San Joaquin Valley did