Usually when The Panama News covers a Tuesday lecture at the Tupper Center, it’s reported in the science section. This time, however, the talk was about the tentative first steps toward an integrated coastal management system for Darien province, partly a description of applied science but mainly a discourse on public policy options regarding a vast economic resource.
The intersections of science, business and politics ought to be unremarkable by now.
In US history they appeared early on, when the Constitutional Convention that George Washington chaired put patents into the fundamental law of the land, when Thomas Jefferson sent out the Lewis and Clark expedition to study the vast new territory bought from Napoleon, and later when the wealthy British chemist James Smithson bequeathed £100,000 --- the seed money for the Smithsonian Institution --- to the US government. Although the business applications were probably only an afterthought, there may have been no more fateful exchange between science and politics than when a group of eminent scientists sent a letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, advising him of the possibility of creating an atomic bomb.
As the standard histories tend to be written, many of the consequences and controversies of events such as those noted above tend to be downplayed, and with them the often transcendent importance of politics at such intersections.
Few people make the connection between the sessions over which Washington presided that long-ago summer in Philadelphia and the current impasse in US-Andean free trade talks, but the main problem in the latter case is precisely about patents and other intellectual properties. What Lewis and Clark did made a new nation concentrated on North America’s eastern seaboard very proud, but autochthonous nations like the Mandans, the Blackfeet and the Cheyenne would have a very different emotional response to that which followed from the famous expedition. Few visitors to the Smithsonian’s museums along Washington’s Mall stop to think that they are the beneficiaries of a protest against Merrie Olde England’s discriminatory bastardy laws. We have antiwar and environmentalist movements to keep the misgivings of Albert Einstein and others about the effect of their letter to Roosevelt alive in the public memory, but there are also people on public school textbook commissions who would bury that story.
Nowadays powerful economic interests hire scientists to give a veneer of expertise to the special regulatory agendas they urge upon the political authorities, religious denominations seek to insert their dogmas into high school science texts or mold scientific research policies to their ethical views, and politicians are wont to fund studies designed to tell them what they and the people who financed their campaigns want to hear. And of course, a large portion of the world’s great scientific advances are made at public research and education institutions, often with financial support through grants from business corporations, industry associations or private foundations, grants whose strongest political and economic strings are pulled in the decisions about which research gets funded and which doesn’t.
Such intersections may be most prevalent in the industrialized countries, but we have them here, too. Though the political and economic parameters affecting scientific work at one such juncture were hardly stated, they were most apparent in a December 14 presentation at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute’s Tupper Center, by the University of Miami’s Dr. Daniel O. Suman, about an “Integrated Coastal Management Project for Darien Province.”
Suman, it must be pointed out, is anything but a garden-variety political hack. His PhD is in oceanography from the University of California at San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His JD is from UC Berkeley’s law school. He has master degrees in education from Columbia, where he also pursued Latin American studies. In 1983 did postdoctoral work here at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He has been one of the editors of Ecology Law Quarterly. He’s on the board of directors of the Law of the Sea Institute. He serves on the Bush administration’s Federal Advisory Committee on Marine Protected Areas. He has worked with UNESCO to study development policies in the Volga-Caspian Basin, and written about the coastal and fisheries management policies of Cuba, Chile, Ecuador and Peru.
The former Smithsonian fellow told the Tupper Center audience about the study and planning phases of the Integrated Coastal Management for Darien Project, of which he is project director and which may or may not be continued by the Torrijos administration. Coastal management is inherently political, and the study that Dr. Suman described was funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) and conducted during the Moscoso administration. Suman said that he hopes that the new administration won’t throw away the work of the team that he headed merely because it was conducted under the prior government.
He explained that the research project’s mandate “was to look at the province --- it’s not an ecosystem view.”
But as it revolves around the subject of “coastal management” in “Darien province,” the study is inevitably and primarily about the vast Gulf of San Miguel estuary, a natural phenomenon that extends way inland along rivers that can be navigated at high tide but frequently go dry at low tide. The gulf is a 1,760 square kilometer body of water into which its tributary rivers drain some 29 billion cubic meters of fresh water per year. The Darien coast features rainforests, dry forests, rocky shorelines, isolated little sandy beaches, vast mud flats and an impressive fringe of mangroves.
One of the tangible results of Suman’s work is a Darien coastal atlas --- which unfortunately has not been and won't be mass produced --- that looks at some 40 factors ranging from oceanography to land use, from seafood catches to political subdivisions, from coral reefs to household facilities.
The human dimensions of the phenomenon that was studied include the prospects for managing areas adjacent to Colombian war zones, and places along preferred routes for all manner of smuggling. Many of the places proposed to be managed are subject to conflicting territorial claims by indigenous groups, long established and predominantly black fishing communities and a host of newcomers, the latter including shrimp trawlers from Panama City, colonists from the central provinces, environmentalist groups and powerful individuals who have acquired titles to vast tracts of the Darien.
The study is about a place that some 10,000 people call home, who mostly live in houses without plumbing and in many cases without privies. It’s about one of Panama’s few remaining bastions of adult illiteracy, a place where most governmental institutions have no presence and few public services are available.
But those are just human dimensions of a geographical entity, the management of whose resources is being contemplated.
“For me,” Suman said, “the key ecosystem is mangroves.” Mostly the province features the red mangrove (Rhizospora mangle), but there are other species of the trees to be found there as well.
Mangroves are the source of naturally insect-resistant wood, a critical building material in several of Panama’s vernacular architectures. They also make charcoal out of the stuff.
For the coastal economy, the mangrove swamps are the critical intertidal breeding grounds for fish, mollusks and the tiny organisms that form the base of the marine food chain. Suman noted that although these forests are mostly untouched, “the agricultural frontier in many areas of San Miguel comes right up to the mangroves.”
“Agricultural frontier,” as in areas appropriated and deforested by outsiders, mostly small farmers and ranchers from the Azuero but also some very wealthy and powerful interests headquartered in Panama City.
The coastal management study, which in part relied on consultations with people in about a dozen Darien communities, outlined five “priority themes.” At the top of the list was fisheries, followed by conservation, waste disposal problems, eco-tourism and cooperation among institutions.
The study zeroed in on the coastal area’s major economic activity, shrimping. Some 1,500 “artisanal” shrimpers who work from cayucos and about 30 industrial trawlers catch white shrimp in the San Miguel estuary, which they sell for $5 per pound. For the artisans, it’s an industry that collectively brings in from $600,000 to $700,000 per year. For the trawlers the catch and revenues are perhaps three times that much.
These figures are imprecise because there isn’t any regular presence of government fisheries people in the area. Data can be collected from the National Maritime Authority about the seafood unloaded by the trawlers at their Vacamonte base, the one company that flies seafood from the Darien to Albrook, and with the right persuasion, from the proprietors of the fish houses who buy from the artisanal fishers.
One interesting and probably important scientific observation made in the course of the study is that shrimp tend to migrate toward the province's shores at the times when the freshwater discharge from the Darien's rivers is at its greatest. The movements and life cycles of shrimp populations in Panamanian waters has long been the object of study, particularly for the governmental purpose of establishing shrimping seasons, but until now the Darien has for the most part represented a gap in our data about the national fisheries. Moreover, according to Suman, shrimp are what we know best, as on a national level we don't keep track of many other fisheries resources, such as the culturally and economically important corvina.
As far as the research team could tell, shrimping in the Gulf of San Miguel is sustainable at its current levels.
The study looked at the organization of the shrimping industry. Toward the top of the economic pyramid, the differences among shrimpers are overridden by a little oligopoly of two or three companies that buy and market virtually all of the catch from both the artisans and the trawlers.
This does not mean that there are no conflicts. The trawlers, which are banned from certain shrimping areas by law and kept away from others by shallows that they can’t safely navigate, nevertheless compete with the cayucos in many areas. Moreover, with their big industrial nets they catch all manner of other marine wildlife, in particular the juveniles of fish upon which the artisans in part depend to feed themselves and their families. The trawlers just dump this “by-catch” back into the sea, which is why pelicans follow these boats around, and one more reason why artisanal fishermen resent the competition. The study offers various alternatives to ameliorate these disputes, in the form of different possible zones where trawlers would be or would not be allowed to operate.
But even with these problems, why a coastal management plan for a fishery that’s sustainable? Why new or expanded bureaucracy to protect mangroves that are not being exploited?
Therein lies one of the main unstated political assumptions behind the study. It is presumed that more people and industries will invade the Darien and, just as colonos have cut down the forests in the northern part of the province, trash the resources along the coasts.
The appropriation of Darien resources by outside interests was the policy of the Moscoso administration. As these words were typed, the former Minister of Economy and Finance is being investigated to determine how, given the assets he reported when he took office and the size of his government salary, he acquired vast tracts of Darien land. Former Mireyista legislator Haydée Milanés de Lay, whose May re-election was voided due to massive election law violations and who was crushed in the September rerun, advocated ethnic cleansing across the province, using the slogan “indigenous to the comarca” to incite seizures of the collectively held Embera and Wounaan lands outside of the Embera-Wounaan Comarca.
In Suman’s main presentation (before the question and answer period), there was no mention of indigenous land titles, indigenous land claims or the existence of the comarca, nor any mention of consultation with indigenous authorities. In answer to this reporter’s question, he did acknowledge some of these land conflicts, and noted that some of the communities consulted by his study group were indigenous villages along the rivers affected by the Gulf of San Miguel’s tides.
Moreover, the possibilities of tourism in the coastal area --- which Embera communities such as the one at Playa de Muerto are counting upon, and which in turn rely on the local forests not having been turned into cow pastures --- were downplayed in the study and planning priorities. This sector “may be an alternative for a limited number of people,” Suman said, adding that the lack of infrastructures and trained people are limiting factors.
One corollary that an administration with such a political inclination might thus draw from the study that Suman headed could be that, in the big picture of coastal management, it would be of little economic consequence if indigenous communities like Playa de Muerto were displaced.
The lack of the skills needed to develop tourism in places like Playa de Muerto is not a matter of Suman and his team spinning politically convenient facts out of thin air. It’s a major business problem across the entire national tourism industry.
But on either a national or local level, this challenge could be addressed according to a usually unstated assumption that the local people are ignorant savages who can’t learn anything and thus “qualified” outsiders must be brought in to develop the tourism possibilities. On the other hand, it could be addressed by educating local people in the necessary skills. There are various intermediate positions, such as the assumption that locals need to be trained as waiters, housekeepers and tour guides for businesses that will be owned and managed by outsiders.
This locals versus outsiders dichotomy came to the fore again in the question and answer period with respect to another problem that the coastal management study identified, the absence of many key governmental institutions from the area. A questioner asked about where the government personnel needed to staff operations in the studied area might be found, given that among Panama City bureaucrats an assignment to the Darien is generally seen as a terrible exile to the pestilent hinterland. Suman noted that “qualified” locals are hard to find and that in any case the ties of such people in the communities might be a source of corruption, but that people to do the job could be found in Panama City.
Again, it’s a set of assumptions that’s quite convenient if the public policy is to displace the local people and grab their resources.
All which may give the Torrijos administration --- or may not, given the contradictory record of how past PRD governments have dealt with the Darien --- a reason to scrap this coastal management study.
However, a lot of research has been done, and a lot of useful data compiled. The new administration may well decide that, given an uncollapsed fishery and uncut mangrove forests in times when such resources are being destroyed all around the world, it would indeed be prudent to set up a management program for the Darien coast while there’s still something to manage. It might use this IADB-funded study that was made for a Moscoso administration marked by a particular mix of ideologies and interests to carry out the Torrijos administration's policies, which may turn out to be based on a substantially different set of assumptions.
Even if the Torrijos administration decides to limit its response to filing this study in the fabled place where old studies go, Suman said that one of the few copies of the atlas of Darien coastal resources will end up in the library at the Tupper Center. And even if this research project becomes just another obscure reference for future studies, the facts that people are discussing coastal management and an important international lender has financed a study of it are pretty good indicators that the days of the Darien coast’s resources being free for anyone to appropriate are numbered.
Also in this section:
Canal toll hike for container ships
Darien coastal management study
Organic farming boom in Costa Rica
Business & Economy Briefs
