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Forest and Soil Conservation Is Protecting the Panama Canal
FrontLines - April 2009
The fact that Reinaldo Rodriguez has only one arm has not held him back. He farms his own land, runs a nursery in La Concha, Chilibre, and often works as a mechanic. Now, thanks to USAID’s bamboo workshop in Panama’s Nuevo Ocu region, he is learning to become a skilled bamboo furniture carpenter. Bamboo is indigenous to Panama and flourishes in the climate, protecting the land from erosion and helping to retain both water and soil quality. Future entrepreneurs learn new techniques to build, create, and sell hand-made furniture and other products, all made from readily-available bamboo.
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Business owner Raquel Santana is part of the effort to protect the Panama Canal Watershed
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Panama City, Panama—A 40,000-ton container ship makes its way through the Panama Canal, a 50-mile journey taking 10 hours from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
But urban growth and activities
such as cattle ranching threaten to erode the hills and pour silt into the lakes that feed the canal system—damage that USAID and Panama have teamed up to fight.
Some 52 million gallons of fresh water flow into and out of the locks that raise and lower the freighter in a series of steps—up and down as the freighter exits into the Pacific.
As water drains from the locks, the ship moves lower and this fresh water is flushed out to the sea.
All the water to operate the canal, Panama’s most important economic resource, comes from the canal watershed, which feeds the streams as well as lakes Gatun and Alhajuela.
But urbanization, deforestation,
and sedimentation threaten Panama’s biodiversity and the ecosystems that form the canal watershed. Proper management of water resources and biodiversity
conservation are now critical to Panama’s long-term economic and social well-being.
Starting in 2003, USAID and Panama have partnered to protect
the canal watershed by reducing biodiversity loss and erosion. The Agency provides technical assistance and training and helps residents establish farm plans, increase incomes, and create jobs while conserving resources and biodiversity.
Over the past two years, USAID trained 500 canal watershed
residents to set up live fencing, reforest with native species,
protect the riparian forest, improve pasture species, protect soil, improve soil fertility, and prepare organic manure.
Park guard learning water monitoring techniques in Soberanía National Park.
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Monitoring for water quality is underway at 18 sites in partnership
with Panama’s National Environmental Authority.
To conserve biodiversity in the Chagres and Soberanía National Parks in the canal watershed, projects
promote sustainable agriculture
and cattle ranching, conservation
of deciduous forests, alternatives to illegal hunting, biological
monitoring by community members, and development of an information system for parks management.
In addition, USAID is working
to improve the visitor management
and entrance fee collection
system of the parks. To date, 150,000 hectares are under improved management. USAID also provides extensive technical support to local environmentally-
friendly businesses such as nurseries and apiaries—from business planning to innovative agricultural techniques and products
that help businesses grow. As a result, threats to the watershed’s
biodiversity and the integrity of protected areas and natural ecosystems are being significantly reduced.
Bee production is one environmentally-
friendly way for people to earn money.
Dulcelinda Ortega de Alfonso has built an apiary, her first step toward building her own beekeeping
business, after taking a two-week workshop that taught every aspect from the breeding process to honey collection.
“I found a wild bee nest next to my house one day and that gave me the idea to start a new line of business to help my family,”
she said.
Another resident, landowner Raquel Santana, enrolled her small nursery in a project teaching
seed identification, raising native plants, and producing organic fertilizer as well as business
planning and marketing. Within one year, Santana’s business produced large numbers of plants for local reforestation and ornamental plants for a major construction company.
Forests protect the banks of the Panama Canal from erosion and water pollution leading to excessive vegetation growth.
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Rita Spadafora and Eliana Stanziola of USAID’s office in Panama, and Joan Ablett of International Resources Group contributed to this story.★
FrontLines is published
by the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs
U.S. Agency for International Development
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