Panama Fights for Its Forests

Environmental experts are concerned about the dangers of uncontrolled destruction of the world’s rain forests. Recently the government of Panama began an urgent campaign to save the country’s forests, but it is meeting resistance from, among other interested parties, the United States.

Last April the Panamanian government made it illegal to cut down any tree more than five years old--one of the most stringent environmental decrees ever handed down in Latin America. The plan is to slow the encroachment of lumber and farming operations on the once-lush Panamanian countryside, particularly in the watershed of the Panama Canal. The decree resulted from environmental studies predicting that the flow of silt from denuded land into the lakes that feed the canal will make the canal shallower. That could limit its operations by the year 2000, when Panama takes full control of the canal from the United States.

Panama’s lumber industry is challenging the legality of the decree, and peasant leaders warn of violence if the government prevents nomadic subsistence farmers from moving in after timber operations to practice slash-and-burn agriculture, as they have for generations. Some U.S. environmental specialists also question whether the silt problem is really serious, leading the Panama Canal Commission--a joint U.S.-Panamanian agency charged with administering the canal until the year 2000--to challenge a proposal to raise money for reforestation programs by increasing the toll on ships using the canal. Commission officials insist that shipping tolls should be used only to operate and maintain the waterway.

Saving Panama’s rain forests is as much a political and financial challenge as a scientific one. The canal commission may have valid objections to some plans for dealing with Panama’s deforestation, but while it raises technical objections it should also be looking for ways to help. Whether it is an immediate or a long-term problem, the deforestation of Panama will eventually affect the canal’s viability as an international waterway. To its credit, the Panamanian government is trying to reverse the trend. Other underdeveloped nations whose rain forests are being destroyed--in Africa and around the Amazon Basin--should be so farsighted.