Americans' Taste for Mexican Beer Sucking Up Water Supply, Mayor Says David Agren - The Guardian
go to original July 1, 2016

The brewery makes Corona and other brands of beer such as Modelo for export to the United States. (Sarah-Rose/Flickr)

A brewery satisfying Americans’ thirst for Mexican beers such as Corona is sucking so much water from wells in an arid region near the US border that it has left one municipality bone dry, according to a local mayor.

“WE HAVE NO WATER FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION,” Mayor Leoncio Martínez Sánchez of the municipality of Zaragoza, wrote in single-sentence letter to Coahuila state governor Rubén Moreira.

Zaragoza is currently suffering through water shortages so severe “there’s barely a drop of water when you open the tap”, Martínez told the Guardian.

A nearby brewery run by the US firm Constellation Brands currently draws water from wells drilled to a depth of 500 metres, and Martínez said that plans to increase production at the plant would “aggravate” the current situation, especially as the federal government ramps up plans for fracking in northern Mexico.

“We’re worried because we’re already being impacted by this extraction of 1,200 litres of water per second” by the brewery, he said. “It’s contradictory that while Constellation Brands has industrial amounts of water to make beer, the municipality of Zaragoza doesn’t have 100 litres [per second of water] of water to give people to drink or use in their homes.”

The brewery – which sits in the municipality of Nava, 45 kilometres south of the US border at Eagle Pass, Texas – makes Corona and other brands of beer such as Modelo for export to the United States. Constellation Brands, which bought the plant in 2013, subsequently announced a $2.27bn investment to expand the facility and a glass factory, saying it would churn out 20m bottles of beer per day by the end of 2017.

Read the rest at The Guardian

Related: Taste the Rainbow: How the Queer-Focused Booze Market Is Growing Fast (The Globe and Mail)

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