Mexico City

Olivia So (MLA I  ‘21)

Mexico City’s sewer system, servicing 18 million residents, is connected with the irrigation channels of the Mezquital Valley’s agriculture fields. The wastewater generated possesses the excretion of drugs, in its unaltered form or modified by the human body. A study examining the wastewater of the “Central Emitter” identified ibuprofen, naproxen, and diclofenac, alongside Metformin and Carbamazepine, throughout the irrigation channels in the Mezquital Valley. Within the urban wastewater in Rio San Ángel, a neighborhood in Mexico City, paracetamol, salicylic acid, sulfamethoxazole, and ofloxacin was found in the wastewater. To understand the concentration of pharmaceuticals found within the wastewater, we must understand how Mexico City's urban landscape influences public health, nutrition, and the resultant wastewater composition.

Neighborhoods throughout Mexico City do not have equal access to water as the city has 8,000 miles of failing pipes that waste 40% of the water running through it or is illegally stolen. Because residents’ taps may only release water once a week or less, and when it does the quality is questionable, residents store and ration water in buckets or rooftop tinaco (water tank) when pipas, or large water trucks, deliver water.


Haner, Josh, photographer. “[A pipa in the San Andrés Totoltepec neighborhood.]” Photograph. From Kimmelman, Michael. “Mexico City, Parched and Sinking, Faces a Water Crisis.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Feb. 2017.

This unreliable access to drinkable water contributes to the consumption of packaged drinks, especially sweetened beverages.This is a complex issue as some portions of the population also prefer sweetened beverages over plain water as reported by Elizabeth Roberts, especially when sweetened beverages were cheaper than bottled water until 2014. The tax on sugar-sweetened beverages did decrease purchases, however longer term studies need to exist to understand whether this trend continues or if consumers substitute to cheaper brands or untaxed foods and beverages, not changing nutrition consumption. The prevalence of sweetened beverages and packaged foods contributes to the obesity rates and sugar intake among urban residents. It is not that “food deserts” exist, as fresh fruits and vegetables are available throughout most neighborhoods in Mexico City, rather “food swamps” where these calorie dense foods greatly affect the nutrition available. In Bridle-Fitzpatrick’s study, low-income and middle-income neighborhoods possessed higher access to small vendors and convenience stores that sell junk food and beverages.

Mexico is well-documented with the highest obesity and overweight rates in the world and diabetes prevalence at 14.4% in 2006, with almost half the cases undiagnosed. Rafael Meza states that “1 in 3 to 1 in 2 individuals [could be] getting a diabetes diagnosis in their lifetime.” In order to treat these chronic illnesses, purchasing medication in Mexico is both easier and cheaper than in the United States. Pharmacies are not only abundant in major cities but also most medications do not require a prescription, excluding antibiotics. A study completed by Núria Homedes and Antonio Ugalde examines pharmacies on the Mexico-United States border and the Mexican tendency to self-prescribe. Their study also found that “antibiotics were frequently used inappropriately, regardless of whether they had been prescribed by a physician” and that many workers within pharmacies are not formally trained and rely on medication information obtained from promoters of particular brands. A common model for pharmacies is to partner with an adjacent physician, allowing for ease in obtaining a prescription if necessary. This demonstrates the potential unethical issue of doctors prescribing more expensive medications to the pharmacy they are in contract with. The ease of pharmaceutical access and the tendency for Mexicans to self-medicate leads to excess consumption that will end up in waste water in the end.

The unique relationships between water access, nutrition, and pharmaceuticals in Mexico City contributes to the composition of the wastewater irrigating the fields in the Mezquital Valley. However it is not just a matter of what Mexico City residents are ingesting, but also the failing water infrastructure, a broader network of the nutrition that is available to them, and the chronic illnesses affecting the entire nation.



Bridle-Fitzpatrick, Susan. "Food Deserts or Food Swamps?: A Mixed-methods Study of Local Food Environments in a Mexican City." Social Science & Medicine 142 (2015): 202-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.08.010

Calderón, Aarón, Mónica Meraz, and Araceli Tomasini. "Pharmaceuticals Present in Urban and Hospital Wastewaters in Mexico City." Journal of Water Chemistry and Technology 41, no. 2 (2019): 105-12. https://doi.org/10.3103/S1063455X19020073

Colchero, M Arantxa, Barry M Popkin, Juan A Rivera, and Shu Wen Ng. "Beverage Purchases from Stores in Mexico under the Excise Tax on Sugar Sweetened Beverages: Observational Study." BMJ 352 (2016): H6704. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h6704

Homedes, Nuria & Ugalde, Antonio. (2012). “Mexican Pharmacies and Antibiotic Consumption at the US-Mexico Border.” Southern Med Review. 5. 9-19. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3606934/

Kimmelman, Michael. “Mexico City, Parched and Sinking, Faces a Water Crisis.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Feb. 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/02/17/world/americas/mexico-city-sinking.html

Meza, Rafael, Tonatiuh Barrientos-Gutierrez, Rosalba Rojas-Martinez, Nancy Reynoso-Noverón, Lina Sofia Palacio-Mejia, Eduardo Lazcano-Ponce, and Mauricio Hernández-Ávila. "Burden of Type 2 Diabetes in Mexico: Past, Current and Future Prevalence and Incidence Rates." Preventive Medicine 81 (2015): 445-50. https://dx.doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.ypmed.2015.10.015

Roberts, Elizabeth F. S . "Food Is Love: And So, What Then?" BioSocieties 10, no. 2 (2015): 247-252. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2015.18

“Water Insecurity and Gender in Mexico City.” Institute for Reserch on Women & Gender, Institute for Reserch on Women & Gender, n.d. https://irwg.umich.edu/news/water-insecurity-and-gender-mexico-city

Mezquital

Kymberly Ware (MLA II  ‘21)

The Mezquital Valley is a microcosm of Mexico’s economic, ecological, and public health landscape in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement. From land privatization to the use of wastewater irrigation that is highly concentrated with anti-diabetic, anticonvulsant drugs and their byproducts, this ground has been witness to the beginning and end of a food system that has fueled a public health crisis.

Policy changes at the close of the twentieth century marked the beginning of the ecological shift for this landscape. Before the passage of the 27th amendment to the Constitution of Mexico in the late 1980s, the country’s agricultural land ownership primarily took the form of communally based ejidos. Since the establishment of the ejido system in 1917, farmers had autonomy over their cultivation practices and were able to produce economically viable crops while creating seed banks to strengthen the genetic resources from which new cultivars could be bred. For example, farmers had developed diverse varieties of rain-fed maize (Zea mays), or corn, that could be used for multiple outputs in addition to consumption including handicraft, fuel, building material and medicinal production. Following the passage of the 27th amendment, the Mexican agricultural lands were parceled to open up the land for possible private ownership. When NAFTA exponentially increased the amount of corn produced in the United States and exported to Mexico, the economic viability of small-scale domestic corn production fell, forcing many farmers to sell their land to private agribusinesses like ConAgra to raise large scale commercial mono-crops of irrigated corn. Some ejido parcels remain in Mexico, and the Mezquital Valley has some of the largest ejidos still left in the country.

The corn produced in the intensively managed, large-scale system in both Mexico and the United States is primarily dent and sweet corn. While sweet corn is used for consumption, the output of dent corn is largely used for livestock feed or to produce processed goods such as high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). Depressed prices and overproduction of corn post-NAFTA exacerbated the proliferation of cheap highly processed food products that depend on HFCS and hydrogenated vegetable oil. The increased availability of these byproducts like sugar-sweetened beverages, chips, and other calorie-dense, nutrient-deficient foods has led to increased obesity rates in Mexico. The pharmaceuticals found in the wastewater, soils and groundwater of the Mezquital Valley tell this story of the food system and public health issues of Mexico City.

Medications used to treat chronic diseases associated with obesity are the most concentrated in all levels of the wastewater irrigation system of the Mezquital. Of the dense pharmaceutical cocktail that enters into the region’s irrigation canals every day, the anti-diabetic medication Metformin and anticonvulsant drug Carbamazepine are the most persistent—showing in high concentrations in deeper levels of the soils, reaching groundwater, recirculating through drinking wells and even translocating to the tissue of certain crops.

Deuschle, L. “Landrace: Zea Mays and the NAFTA Landscape.”Scapegoat. Issue 6 (2014)

Anchoring the corn and facilitating the movement and concentration of pharmaceuticals, the clay soils of the Mezquital are an archive of an economically, culturally and ecologically disrupted landscape in the wake of trade liberalization. In this reframing of soil classification, we can begin to understand soils as a record of how humans not only interact with the ground but are impacted by its outputs as a result of those interactions.



Bolling, C. “The U.S. Presence in Mexico’s Agribusiness.” Foreign Agricultural Economic Report. No. 253. Economic Service Research, USDA. (1994)

Deuschle, L. “Landrace: Zea Mays and the NAFTA Landscape.”Scapegoat. Issue 6 (2014)

Clark SE, Hawkes C, Murphy SM, Hansen-Kuhn KA, Wallinga D.. “Exporting Obesity: US farm and trade policy and the transformation of the Mexican consumer food environment." International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health, no. 18 (2012): 53-65.

Eggen, T. and Cathrine Lillo, “Antidiabetic II Drug Metformin in Plants: Uptake and Translocation to Edible Parts of Cereals, Oily Seeds, Beans, Tomato, Squash, Carrots, and Potatoes.” Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. No. 60. (2012): 6926-6935.

Perramond, Eric P. “The Rise, Fall and Reconfiguration of the Mexican Ejido.” Geographical Review. Vol. 98, No. 3 (2008): 356-71.