Panama Business & Economy Briefs

ACP puts off locks bidding again

It has four international consortia, including 30 of the world's largest construction and engineering firms, pre-qualified to bid. The bidding process was to lead to a December 10 submission of proposals, that date having been set after the original August 22 deadline. However, the Panama Canal Authority has put the process off, and now has set a March 3, 2009 submission date. The problem? It seems that nobody was set to bid within the ACP construction cost budget that was advertised to the voters in the 2006 referendum campaign. This is the third delay in the locks bidding process, but the ACP says that so far the dry excavation contracts for the new channel have been for less than anticipated and it expects the locks to come within its budget projections as well.

548 Panamanians working on canal expansion

In the 2006 canal expansion referendum campaign, the Panama Canal Authority promised that the construction of a third set of locks and related work on the canal expansion project would, when the "multiplier effect" is counted, create 297,400 jobs in Panama. According to El Panama America, in August there were 548 Panamanians working on the canal expansion project.

Canal traffic down in FY 2008

In the 2006 canal expansion referendum campaign, the Panama Canal Authority promised that US imports from China coming through the canal would grow constantly at the same rate of increase that we saw between 2000 and 2005 through the year 2025. In the 2008 fiscal year that ended on September 30, there were 14,271 ship transits of the Panama Canal. That's down from 14,702 transits in fiscal 2007. The absolute drop came mainly as the result in a decline in US imports from China and other Asian countries.

More than one million tourists in first nine months

The Tourism Authority of Panama reports that through the month of September this country logged the arrival of some 1,111,000 tourists, which is 13.1 percent higher than the same period in 2007 and the earliest Panama has ever broken the million tourist barrier. Nearly three-quarters of the tourists came in through Tocumen Airport and most of the rest come through Paso Canoa or on cruise ships. The increase in tourist arrivals has been matched by rises in hotel occupancy rates.

New flights between Europe and Panama

The nature and sources of tourism and airline travel involving Panama are changing, and the shifts are apparent in some announcements by the Dutch KLM and the Spanish Iberia airlines. Starting January 4, Iberia will be adding one more flight per week on its Madrid - Guatemala City - Panama route. Meanwhile KLM has announced that it will increase its weekly flights between Amsterdam and Panama from three to five. In part it's because we are getting more tourists from Europe, and in part because Latin American travelers are increasingly unwilling or unable to fly to Europe along routes that go through US hubs. For the most part the announcements add up to a gain for Panama as a tourist destination and air travel hub at the expense of Miami.

Land swap may save Fort Randolph mangroves

In 2005 the Torrijos administration granted a concession to Colon Container Terminal, a subsidiary of the Taiwanese shipping company Evergreen, to expand their Coco Solo port facility into the mangroves and lagoon at the entrance to the old Fort Randolph. In the highly degraded remnants of the area's mangrove forests, this particular site remains as a key breeding area for many marine species and the sale was bitterly contested by environmentalist groups. The opponents had the law on their side, but under the current administration environmental laws are very nearly a dead letter. However, there are physical realities on the ground, which make the filling and construction on the site in question expensive, and that may be the salvation of that place. Evergreen is offering to give up the concession to 3.1 hectares of mangroves in exchange for 12.8 hectares that used to be mangrove forests. The swap is now part of a proposed law that's being debated in the National Assembly.

Black streak blight grips Chiriqui banana industry

El Panama America reports that the sigatoka negra --- black streak --- blight is now affecting about 50 percent of the banana stems of the troubled COSEMUPAR cooperative in Puerto Armuelles, which runs about 3,000 hectares of plantations. The blight has cut banana production at the cooperative by about two-thirds.

Atlantic side canal ferry being readied

A ferryboat is tied up near the old Fort Davis warehouses and facilities for its operation are under construction between the old Mindi dynamite docks and where the French Canal intersects the road out to Fort Sherman. The people of Colon's Costa Abajo --- that part of the province west of the canal --- overwhelmingly don't like the idea of a ferry to cross the Panama Canal's north end, but it seems that despite campaign promises that's what they're going to get in lieu of the tunnel or bridge that they'd prefer, at least for now.

C&W wins 40-second minute

Cable & Wireless is not the most popular company in Panama. One of the smaller reasons for that was their practice of counting 40 seconds as a "minute" for charges to their telephone customers. The regulators ordered a stop to the practice, the company appealed, and now, several years later, the Supreme Court has declared the company's practice legal.

Seguro Social computer chaos

'Oh, we had a database crash,' they said, promising to have the Seguro Social Fund (CSS) computerized information service back up within two days. Without one's name in the database, it's impossible to get an ID card (carnet) that one must have to get a medical appointment in the Seguro Social system. It's also impossible to get an official doctor's note to excuse a person from work, court appearances or so on. The database also keeps track of patients' prescriptions. But after two days, the service wasn't restored. The story changed to one about how the old database system is obsolete and being scrapped, and that the information in it is being manually transferred to a new computer database, such that the Seguro Social computer system will be down for 90 days, by the latest estimate. So, what to do? The CSS has set up a phone number to assist people who can't wait 90 days for their carnets, 503-0011. But it seems that mostly people get a busy signal if they try using that number. The fall-back plan to that fall back plan --- they didn't have a plan to begin with --- is that people with expired carnets may use those while the Torrijos administration stumbles through the database problem that it created.

Government cuts back hemodialysis services

As a part of the Torrijos administration's officially denied but inexorable movement toward the privatization of health care services, government kidney dialysis clinics have eliminated one shift from their operations. Already chronic renal failure patients had been complaining that Seguro Social and Ministry of Health clinics were overburdened, and now that the public facilities have eliminated their 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. shifts services are likely to decline further.

Torrijos administration proposes Atlantic side road

It's one of those projects that an administration may plan but will never build. The Ministry of Public Works has unveiled a plan to connect Bocas del Toro and Colon provinces by a 230-kilometer road from Miguel de la Borda on Colon's Costa Abajo to Rambala on the mainland of Bocas del Toro province. The stated price tag is about $350 million. No way does it get underway, or even out for bids, before the Torrijos administration leaves office next July. It might, however, be embraced by a future administration. There are environmental issues about building through trackless wilderness areas, sovereignty issues about building in indigenous areas and law enforcement implications about expanding drug smuggling routes that must be confronted if the project is to go forward.

Mining company wants most of southwestern Veraguas

Oro Gold, a Canadian-based multinational mining company, was already denounced by the Sona city council for its intentions to strip mine on some of its existing 9,000-hectare gold mining concession. Now the company has asked for a concession covering 95,149 hectares, basically the entire districts of Sona and Las Palmas, or most of southwestern Veraguas province. The neighbors are mobilizing to oppose the request.

RP - Canada free trade talks

The present administration has closed free trade deals with a number of Latin American countries, and the biggest and most controversial one --- the Trade Promotion Agreement with the United States --- awaits either a congressional lame duck jam-through after the November election or a renegotiation by the next administration. That leaves the biggest trade talks remaining on the Torrijos administration's shift those with Canada, and on October 27 in Ottawa the first round of those talks began. The trickiest points are expected to be about agriculture and services. Panama manufactures few of the things that we might import from Canada, and for the most part our agricultural sectors produce different things. However, Canadian agriculture is subsidized, and, although it produces no rice to directly compete with that grown in Panama, if we got cheap enough wheat coming from Canada people might start eating more bread and noodles and less rice so the subsidy issue is going to be a problem. In the services sector, the big protectionist pressure will be from Panamanian banks, insurance companies and professionals to exclude Canadian competitors. From the perspective of many Panamanians, the most controversial thing about Panamanian - Canadian economic relations will remain Canadian companies engaged in strip mining or hydroelectric dam projects.

economy