business

The Puerto Armuelles Fruit Company (PAFCO, a subsidiary of Chiquita Brands) has decided to sell its farms to a group of three cooperatives for $21 million, a price that it rejected when the union representing PAFCO workers, SITRACHILCO, had offered it. The difference is that the co-ops are willing to agree to market their fruit exclusively through Chiquita for 10 years. The end result, if the deal goes through, is that through a paper title transfer Chiquita will have smashed the union at its subsidiary in Puerto Armuelles.

On March 20 some 40 persons at the Hotel Los Quetzales in Cerro Punta, including 20 American tourists and hotel owner Carlos Alfaro, became sick after someone dumped some sort of petroleum distillate into the hotel's water tank. Nobody suffered life-threatening symptoms. Alfaro is blaming a group of 15 cattle ranchers, although he has presented no direct proof as to who contaminated the hotel's water. Alfaro, whose business depends on eco-tourism in the Volcan Baru National Park, has been feuding with farmers and ranchers who graze cattle, raise crops and live within the park - -- illegally, says Alfaro, by right of many decades of residence and use, say his detractors. The confrontation escalated when Alfaro installed a gate on someone else's property to block a gravel road that has been used by local farmers for some 60 years. The incident has sent shock waves through the entire Panamanian tourism industry, with some people taking the poisoning as a deliberate attack on tourism generally and others merely concerned about the bad publicity inherent when foreign visitors become the innocent victims of a Panamanian economic conflict. No arrests have been made in the case.

The Chamber of Commerce reports $91 million in deals struck at this year's recent EXPOCOMER trade fair. That's about a 13 percent decline from the $110 million worth of business they reported at last year's fair.

The National Union of Private Schools (UNCEP) says that the shift of students from private to public schools is continuing this year, with a drop of enrollment of about five percent in the former at the start of the 2003 school year as compared to the beginning of 2002. About 10 percent of Panamanian kids attend private schools, a share that has been declining over the past several years.

Forget it, all you lechers out there. There will be lots of security guards to keep you from romancing the 65 young vixens who will be coming here with hopes of becoming the next Miss Universe. The contestants will stay at the Hotel El Panama, which bested the Caesar Park in the bidding for the contract. Although the war in the Middle East could cause a postponement, the pageant is scheduled for June 3 at Amador's Panama Canal Village. The Panamanian government has given Donald Trump a $9 million subsidy to bring the competition here.

It's mostly a problem of drought, but unusual heavy rains in Panama's most arid section have also been causing losses to the rural economy. We are apparently into an El Niño cycle, how severe nobody is sure. That means that the Azuero Peninsula, which encompasses the provinces of Los Santos and Herrera and part of Veraguas, is producing smaller and fewer melons for export and cattle ranchers are having to buy feed for cattle that are ordinarily just left to graze. But there have been these sporadic and scattered heavy rainstorms as well. Those wreak havoc on the canning tomato industry, because unseasonal rain just when the tomatoes are about ready to be picked causes them to split and promotes mold blights. Another important rural industry in the area, the drying of seawater to make salt, also gets set back when unexpected rains fall. Between all of these losses caused by this year's weird weather, the region's farmers are asking for government relief. One commonly heard request, which is unlikely to be met by a debt-ridden government, is for the construction of irrigation water projects.

Never mind. The Moscoso administration's budget assumptions, criticized by the opposition as mere wishful thinking at the time they were discussed in the legislature, won't be realized after all. The Ministry of Economy and Finance's Estelabel Piad has announced that the government will be collecting just $25 to $30 million in income and sales taxes this year, instead of the $58 million that had been projected.

The Panama Canal Authority is undertaking studies, but seems to its critics to have already made up its mind. Thus farmers who stand to be displaced of new dams are built to flood the Western Watershed have apparently moved from protest to resistance. A Panama Canal Authority press release complains that members of Farmers Coordinator Against the Reservoirs (CCCE) have trashed a hydrology measuring station at Batatilla, which is on the Toabre River in Cocle province, and are vandalizing authority signs with spray-painted anti-dam slogans and threatening authority employees. The authority deals with a smaller group of area residents who accept the canal expansion project and tends to minimize the CCCE, but the anti-dam militants appear to have the support of most people in the areas that would be affected.

High petroleum prices caused by the US-UK war on Iraq and attempts to oust Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez by stopping oil production have hit those Panamanian industries that are driven by fossil fuels very hard, and none harder than our public transportation fleet. The nation's bus drivers had been threatening a strike if no relief was forthcoming, but that possibility has been averted by an agreement that, among other things, allows bus syndicates to obtain and sell fuel at cost (which, however, will include taxes the bus drivers wanted eliminated) and postpones repayments on loans granted by the state-owned National Bank of Panama and Caja de Ahorros for one year. Some critics in the business community are unhappy with this latter provision because a year's use greatly depreciates the value of a bus, drivers notoriously don't repay government loans and in the end all that will be available for repossession will be scrap. Other critics complain that allowing bus syndicates to go into the fuel business is unfair competition for the gas stations.

On March 27 about 60 taxi drivers blocked the Pan-American Highway in Aguadulce for half an hour to protest what they claim is the illegal issuance of new taxi permits. The drivers say that there aren't enough fares for the 172 drivers who had permits to make a decent living, and that the new permits have been granted to supporters of the Moscoso administration.

On March 19 residents of the Juan Demosthenes Arosemena residential area of Colon blocked the Trans-Isthmian Highway to demand pedestrian overpasses. Riot police appeared and ordered the crowd to disperse, but instead pitched battle between stone-throwing protesters and police using tear gas ensued. When the game ended the score was 12-4: a dozen demonstrators under arrest, and four police officers going to the emergency room for treatment of injuries.

On March 21 the world's attention was riveted on an invasion in the Middle East, but in Panama's Legislative Assembly a committee was hearing testimony about other invasions. Leaders of Embera and Wounaan communities, some within the comarca and others not, told the assembly's Indigenous Affairs Committee that collectively held lands are under constant threat by colonos --- landless farmers from the Interior --- illegal Colombian immigrants and other interlopers, and that local officials in the Darien are siding with the invaders. Over many years, during both PRD and Arnulfista administrations, parts of the national government have upheld Embera and Wounaan communities' collective land rights, while other public institutions, the most notorious of which is the Ministry of Agricultural Development, have aided non-indigenous land invaders with government farm loans and political backing. Darien's legislators are split on the issue -- - Sergio Tocamo, an Embera, is generally for indigenous land rights while Haydeé Mílanes de Lay, who is black, tends to side with the non-indigenous squatters.

Because almost all of its shares have been bought by Corporacion Insem, Cemento Panama SA has stopped being listed on Panama's Bolsa de Valores stock exchange. The number of companies traded on the Bolsa has been dwindling, with some companies being absorbed or going out of business and others being ousted for failure to meet reporting or other requirements. The Bolsa's main business has always been on the side of corporate bonds rather than stocks, and the notorious lack of a relationship between market values and share prices has made the exchange's stock market side even more unpopular with wary investors. However, the Bolsa survives because there are certain tax breaks to be had by financing a company through the institution.

Virtually the entire city of Colon was covered with acrid smoke on the morning of March 26, as the result of incineration of wastes from ships by a company in Cristobal. More than two dozen people went to local health care facilities to be treated for respiratory or eye problems related to the smoke. Two journalists from La Prensa face possible two-year prison terms for reporting that the maritime waste disposal industry causes environmental problems.

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