Panama Sounds Alarm : Forest Loss Puts Canal in Jeopardy

Since the Panama Canal opened 73 years ago, most of the dense tropical rain forest around it has disappeared in the name of progress.

The march of civilization into the wilds of Panama has gone something like this: A lumber company would build a road into a virgin forest and cut a few trees per acre. Nomadic subsistence farmers would follow, burn down the remaining trees and plant rice or corn. After exhausting the soil, they would sell out to ranchers, who were favored with government loans, and move on.

The ongoing cycle, typical of 20th-Century rural development in much of the Third World, has deforested at least 70% of the 1,300-square-mile basin that provides fresh water to operate the canal.

‘Symbol of Backwardness’

“The official ideology was to cut down the trees and bring in the cattle,” says Stanley Heckadon Moreno, a Planning Ministry researcher and Panama’s most vocal environmentalist. “The forest was seen as a symbol of backwardness.”

Suddenly, that view has changed. Amid warnings that further deforestation may leave the canal short of water, Panama is moving to abolish a national economic strategy founded on the slash-and-burn habits of its frontier woodsmen.

A two-month-old decree, the most stringent of its kind in Latin America, outlaws until 1992 the destruction of any tree in Panama older than five years.

With only a symbolic force of forest rangers, the government has reported arresting five farmers and fining 44 businessmen $1,000 to $5,000 each for cutting or burning down trees since the decree took effect April 6.

Lumber Industry Upset

The measure faces a Supreme Court challenge by the $6.5-million-a-year lumber industry over abruptly canceled forest concessions. Peasant farmers have vowed to go to jail rather than abandon the only way that they know to grow food for themselves.

If this resistance is overcome, it will be a victory for Heckadon and a small band of environmental activists who, after a decade of doom-saying, have found powerful believers in the country’s military establishment.

Panama is not the only tropical nation struggling to balance the newly appreciated value of its forests against the pressures of population and poverty to open new farmland. But it is a special case because of growing concern for the canal by Panamanians as they prepare to take control from the United States in the year 2000.

“Our national well-being depends on the canal, and its water depends on those forests,” environmentalist Juan Carlos Navarro says. “You probably could not invent a country that depends more on nature.”

The 50-mile-long waterway linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans brings Panama $340 million a year, 17% of its national income, in revenues and other direct benefits. In turn, the canal needs 52 million gallons of fresh water to lift each ship through a series of locks over Panama’s mountainous spine and float it down to the opposite coast, where the water is flushed out to sea.

Scientists have known for years that the man-made reservoir of nearly half this water, Madden Lake--Panamanians call it Lake Alajuela--is slowly filling with soil washed by rain from the steep deforested slopes above it.

Alarm Sounded

But in January, a high-level government panel led by Heckadon sounded an alarm. The lake’s loss of storage capacity, the panel’s 375-page report warned, could reduce the canal’s cargo limits, clientele and revenue by the time that Panama takes over operations.

Then, during two weeks in March, an unprecedented power shortage caused partly by low water levels in the canal basin blacked out sections of Colon and Panama City for several hours a day.

The environmental shocks appear to have stirred Panama’s Defense Force to extend its already dominant influence in the elected civilian government. After inspecting the deforestation from a helicopter, Brig. Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, the Defense Force commander, approved the nationwide tree-cutting prohibition. It is aimed as much at saving the trees of Panama’s southern Darien frontier as those in the canal watershed.

“This is a matter of national security,” Noriega declared. “This is a strategic measure of war. Only the military can control this.”

‘We Were Going in Circles’

Maj. Moises del Rio signed the decree as director of the government’s National Renewable Resources Institute, which until six months ago was answerable to a civilian Cabinet official.

In an interview, Del Rio said the ban will give him time and leverage to negotiate less-stringent controls with the lumber industry.

“We were going around in circles trying to get them to accept voluntary controls,” he said.

With 7,350 jobs at stake, the industry is being allowed to import wood to keep sawmills and furniture factories running. But Cesar A. Manfredo, general manager of the largest mill, said that about half of his 180 workers will be laid off because the imported wood comes pre-cut.

A bigger problem will come early next year, at a time when more than 100,000 subsistence farmers traditionally burn down trees to clear land for planting before the spring rains.

Willing to Go to Jail

“If we cannot keep clearing the land, we will go hungry,” said Luis Barcenas, a peasant who serves on an elected government council in the Madden Lake area. “They might have to take everyone prisoner here.”

Eloy Sanchez, a farmer representative from the same region, said: “There is going to be repression to save the canal. But where are the benefits of the canal for us?”

To Heckadon, the immediate solution is to feed and pay the farmers to plant new trees. Then, he says, the government should “re-educate” them, hire an army of forest rangers and promote a massive switch from grains to root crops such as manioc that can grow in the woods.

Driving his Jeep through the canal watershed, the 43-year-old English-trained environmentalist tried to convey a sense of urgency about his ideas by gesturing intensely with both hands off the wheel and cursing the barren fields of red clay or blackened trees.

‘Green Revolution’ Sought

“We cannot wait two or three more years,” he said. “We have to do now what we’ve neglected for 80 years, bring a green revolution to Panama.”

The $2-million minimum annual cost of his proposals, he said, should be paid by raising the $1.76-per-ton canal shipping toll a penny or more “because Panama cannot afford to go deeper in debt.”

But the U.S.-dominated Panama Canal Commission is opposed, saying its charter does not permit charging canal users for the costs of preserving the watershed, most of which lies outside the Canal Zone.

Besides, insists David C. Baerg, the commission’s environmental and energy control officer, the threat to the canal’s water supply is not as dire as Heckadon makes it sound.

Difference of Opinion

The argument boils down to differing projections of the same 1983 study by Luis A. Alvarado, a canal commission hydrologist, showing that Madden Lake had lost 5% of its storage capacity since 1935.

Heckadon argues that, at the current deforestation rate--1,200 to 2,000 acres a year, by his estimate--silt will fill as much as 40% of the lake by the year 2000, imposing limits on canal operations.

The canal commission, contending that deforestation is far less serious and is slowing in recent years, predicts that no more than 10% of the lake will be lost by the end of the century, with no impact on shipping.

“There is an unfortunate perception here that the canal is in trouble,” Baerg said in an interview in his office during an afternoon downpour.

Environmental Push

One thing both sides agree on is that Panamanians are developing a healthy awareness of the need to protect their environment.

Ruben Blades, Panama’s Grammy Award-winning singer, pushes the message in slick television spots. The National Assn. of Nature Conservation, a businessmen’s action group, is spending $40,000 to fence off a national forest near the canal and train forest rangers. An insurance company mails seeds to clients, urging them to help reforest the country.

The decree against tree cutting has popular support in Panama City, according to local newspaper surveys. Some environmentalists believe this is tied to the nationalistic fervor that underlies Panama’s successful campaign to win future control of the canal under new treaties signed a decade ago.

“Panamanians realize now that the canal must be defended with more than weaponry,” Heckadon said. “They want to manage it as well or better than the Americans did.”