In Mexico, Fears a New Water Treatment Plant Will Kill Wastewater Farming Rebecca Blackwell - The Associated Press | |
go to original April 24, 2017 |
A farmer and his son look on as they flood irrigate a field with wastewater before planting corn, in Mixquiahuala, Hidalgo state, Mexico. (AP/Rebecca Blackwell)
For more than 100 years, most of what gets flushed down Mexico City's toilets has resurfaced two hours to the north in the rivers and reservoirs of the rural Mezquital Valley. A massive new water treatment plant is about to change this.
But rather than welcoming the prospect of cleaner water, angry farmers are demanding the government honor an 1895 presidential decree granting them the right to the capital's untreated sewage, which they see as fertilizer-rich, if foul, irrigation water.
It's a standoff that pits public health concerns — not just for valley residents but for the Mexicans elsewhere who eat the crops — against fears that family farms will go under if they lose access to the raw sewage after the $530 million Atotonilco plant in Hidalgo state, billed as the largest of its kind in Latin America, goes online.
...The capital's waste was hardly seen as a boon when it first began arriving in the poor, semi-arid valley traditionally inhabited by the indigenous Otomi people. But over the decades, the "aguas negras," or "black waters," transformed the region into one of Mexico's most productive breadbaskets. Today, a vast network of low-tech, gravity-based canals irrigates more than 90,000 hectares (220,000 acres).
According to Fernando Sanchez, a 37-year-old opponent of the plant, corn fields here yield an average of 15 tons per hectare (6 tons per acre) and some produce as much as 18 tons (7.3 tons). Once they switch to treated water, he predicts that could fall by nearly half.
Costs are also likely to rise as farmers switch to fertilizers and agrochemicals, which entail their own environmental risks, to make up for the loss of the sewage. Without government support, they say agriculture in the region could become unsustainable and spur migration to the United States and elsewhere in Mexico.
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