The Drought Beyond the Border

Photo by Brent Stirton/Getty Images

While we’ve taken to calling it the Texas drought, it’s important to remember that the drought knows no borders. In Mexico, some 600,000 households “suffered property damage or crop losses due to an unusual combination of floods, drought and freezing weather in 2011,” according to the Associated Press.

The agency spoke with Heriberto Felix Guerra, Mexico’s social development secretary. He told them that “the drought has been so bad that about 2.6 million people in about 1,650 villages and towns in northern Mexico do not even have drinking water.” His agency has had to truck in water to those people.