Page 311 - The Rough Guide to Panama (Travel Guide)

EnvironmEntal issuEs CONTEXTS 309
Environmental issues

As elsewhere in the tropics, the rainforests of Panama are disappearing at an
alarming rate, threatening wildlife and, ultimately, human survival. While 45
percent of the country is still covered in forest, and deforestation rates have
slowed since the millennium, the country is losing around one percent of its
species-rich primary growth a year. A third of the land lies in national parks
and reserves, but many of these are “paper parks” since the perennially
underfunded Ministry of the Environment is short of cash and, in some
cases, political clout and/or the will to enforce the regulations.

Deforestation
Although the large-scale extraction of mahogany, cedar or purpleheart destined for
European and North American markets has come under greater control in recent years,
the timber industry continues to be a major contributor to deforestation as illegal
logging, and more insidiously, selective thinning continues.
By far the main driver of deforestation is colonization, clearing the land for cattle
ranching and subsistence agriculture, and more recently, palm oil cultivation. Having
already denuded the entire Azuero Peninsula and most of the Pacific slopes of central and
western Panama, colonos, or “colonists”, have been moving into eastern Panama in recent
years along the Darién highway and Caribbean coast, sometimes into protected areas,
often with the collusion of government officials. Despite the richness of tropical forests,
the layer of nutritious topsoil is particularly thin so that once cleared it soon becomes
worthless, forcing farmers to move on to fell new areas. Though usually contesting this
encroachment onto their lands, some indigenous communities are also contributing to
deforestation thanks to population increases and forced changes in lifestyle: in some
cash-strapped settlements they are even leasing land to farmers for cattle grazing or
colluding with illegal timber extraction. Panama’s coastal mangrove forests – considered
to be the most extensive, healthiest and most diverse in all Central America – are critically
threatened, from agricultural expansion and coastal development on the mainland and
water pollution, overfishing and sedimentation on the islands and marine areas.
Small-scale initiatives across the country aim to improve environmental awareness,
ranging from assistance for micro-enterprises such as plant nurseries and agroforestry
projects to tree-planting and recycling, often backed by NGOs and international
environmental organizations. One such programme, started in 2003, was supported
through Fundación Nacional Parque Chagres, the result of a “debt-for-nature” swap
whereby $10 million of debt to the US government was eradicated over a 14-year
period in return for the Panamanian government banks spending $700,000 annually
on green-oriented projects and education. Of course it’s no coincidence that the focus
was the Chagres river basin, which is vital to the functioning of the Panama Canal, the
lifeblood of Panama’s economy and not insignificant to the US.
Reforestation programmes in Panama have become more common in the last few
years. Initially they were all teak plantations, which arguably further degrade the soil,
do nothing to sustain biodiversity and, being a monoculture, are more susceptible to
disease; however, there has been a positive recent move towards more sustainable mixed
plantations of native species. The Azuero Earth Project (Wazueroearthproject.org),
another Panama–US collaboration, is attempting to establish a biological corridor in
the Azuero Peninsula, working with local landowners to regenerate tropical dry forest,
as well as carry out community outreach and education programmes.

290-319_Panama_3_Contexts.indd 309 30/06/17 11:52 am