economy

The Darien's Pacific Coast between the Gulf of San Miguel and the Colombian border is a place where the local people --- some indigenous, most of the rest tracing roots back to the African slaves of Spanish colonial times --- fish for a living. It's a hard life, often made harder by the lawlessness that dogs the area and the occasional spillover of Colombia's civil conflicts. Just across the border and down the coast in Colombia, the ethnic mix and economics are similar, but there the place has off and on been a war zone for years. At the moment the government --- and, although it's officially unadmitted, its allies from the theoretically disbanded AUC paramilitary --- dominate the area, which a few years back was the turf of leftist FARC rebels.

The Martinelli administration in Panama and the Uribe administration in Colombia share a right-wing orientation, and one of the things that they are trying to do is something that people from the left, right and center in both countries have advised for years: calm down the area where Panama meets Colombia by promoting economic development on both sides of the border.

And so it is that the Aquatic Resources Authority of Panama (ARAP) and Colombian Agricultural Institute (ICA) have been working to put fishing cooperatives on both sides of the border together with a company that can market their catches, provided that the fish are fresh and plentiful enough to make it profitable. By itself, the Artesanal Agro-Fishery Producers Association of Jaque (APAPAJ) doesn't produce enough to make it worthwhile to fly their catch to market. But when this Darien-based association teams up with similar groups on the adjacent Pacific coast of Colombia and others on Colombia's Caribbean side Gulf of Uraba (which is near Kuna Yala), then air transportation of the catch becomes a reasonable proposition.

Thus, a business alliance among Servicios Integrales Agropecuarios y de Pesca SA (SINTA PEZ), a Colombian seafood marketing company; Aerolineas del Occidente, a Colombian regional airline; APAPAJ and fishing associations along those parts of Colombia's coasts adjacent to Panama. SINTA PEZ provides ice and refrigeration equipment so that the APAPAJ fishers get their catch to the company in fresher condition, where it can be flown to markets in Colombia's major cities and fetch better prices than those to which the artesanal fishers around Jaque have been accustomed.