Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

The current form of globalization is based on petroleum. Massive ships ply the oceans transporting food, goods, raw materials, and yes - oil - from one place on the Earth to another. Central to "efficient" transport is the Panama Canal - or should we say canals. The shortcut through Panama cuts about 9,200 miles off the trip around South America. This is what makes Panama such a prize possession. About 5% of the global cargo and 14% of the US ocean-going cargo pass through Panama each year (Panama - USAID). That may not sound like much, but it equals 13,100 ships per year passing through the canal, and that is expected to double by 2050 (Water Woes at the Panama Canal).

[This figure gives you an idea of how much cargo is being shipped if 13,100 ships yearly is only 5% of the global transport.]

So there is a lot of traffic moving through the Panama Canal, but each one of those ships takes a lot of water to make the trip - 52 MILLION gallons per ship in fact (Water Woes). That is fresh water that is being used to raise and lower each ship 85 feet in the crossing. All of that water comes from one water shed - the Panama Canal Watershed - of which the Chagres River basin is the largest supplier. The same watershed is the sole freshwater source for Panama (Panama Canal Water Resources Management). So the canal alone uses about 680 BILLION gallons of fresh water each YEAR (52 mil gallons * 13,100 ships). Now that is one heck of a lot of fresh water. As a point of comparison, the Portland Oregon Metropolitan area (where I live) has a population of just under 1 million people and uses about 40 billion gallons of fresh water per YEAR.

There are some obvious concerns when one starts thinking about this level of water usage. First, how could a watershed continue to produce above that level of water, and what are the environmental impacts of doing so? Secondly (and I have no answer for this one) what happens to ocean salinization levels when you are pumping in that much fresh water? Third, with fresh water becoming increasingly scarce, who controls this water and at what cost?

There are obvious and known threats to the continued functioning of the Panama Canal: global warming, deforestation, and watershed destruction. Add to this that the canal was just significantly widened, and that the plans are to build additional canals to handle the traffic, and the scope of this problem takes on massive proportions. Global warming is making the water flow unreliable. Droughts have forced closure of the Gatun power station at Gatun Reservoir. Floods have eroded drainage. Logging of the rain forest has impacted drainage and disrupted the normal flow to rivers and reservoirs (Water Woes and USAID).

Fresh water is an increasingly scarce commodity and as such has become a major prize of corporatization. All over the world, but especially in water poor area, corporations are attempting to privatize water systems. An excellent discussion of this can be found in Blue Gold: The global water crisis and the commodification of the world's water supply put out by the International Forum on Globalization (IFG).

"Just at the time governments are backing away from their regulatory responsibilities, giant transnational water, food, energy and shipping corporations are lining up to take advantage of the world's water shortage, acquiring control of water through the ownership of dams and waterways; the development of new technologies such as water desalination and purification; control over the burgeoning bottled water industry; the privatization of municipal and regional water services, including sewage and water delivery; the construction of water infrastructure; and water exportation.

'Water is the last infrastructure frontier for private investors," says Johan Bastin of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Tragically, water is also the last frontier of nature and the commons."

Institutions of globalization such as the IMF and World Bank have aggressively promoted water corporatization in the third world. Nations have been forced to sell part or all of water resources to meet debt payments, or as part of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP). The consequences have been disastrous. The effects of this have been to actually reduce the amount of fresh water available to populations, or to make access to that water prohibitively expensive. "For example, in India, some households pay a staggering 25 percent of their income on water." ... "Biwater Plc. corporation increased water rates in Subic Bay in the Philippines by 400 percent." (Blue Gold) Enron actually owns part of the Panamanian water system (Blue Gold), and the plan has called for the government to allow private water contracting (V. IMF and World Bank Push Water Privatization News & Notices for IMF & World Bank Watchers, Spring 2001). Water privatization has been met with citizen protests all over South America and Panama is no exception (6,000 Clash in Panama City, AP 1998).

While GATT, GATS, NAFTA, and IMF/World Bank forces are playing a dramatic role in Panama's water plight, it is focused in the Plan Puebla Panama (PPP). The PPP is the most direct threat of corporate water ownership (supported heavily by former President Vincente Fox). The following quote is from Plan Puebla-Panama: The Next Step in Corporate Globalization by Hansen and Wallach (Labor Notes, 4/2002): (emphases mine)

"PPP would encourage foreign investment in the region, strategically located between the Pacific and the Atlantic, by constructing a series of transportation and sweatshop corridors spanning the isthmus.

Fox wants to transplant the maquiladora, production-for-export model that has been applied with disastrous results in northern Mexico, but with a few new twists. The isthmus is one of the most bio-diverse regions on the planet, and contains some of the most important fresh water reserves in the hemisphere. Exploitation of these resources is key to the plan. "

The US is in support of PPP: "Secretary of State Colin Powell [has] told Vincente Fox that the U.S. will support the plan if Fox militarizes the Mexico-Guatemala border to prevent immigration from Central America northward."

The US has a long and rather sordid history with Panama, and that is unlikely to change anytime in the near future. From the inception of the Panama canal and the importation of African workers to build the canal, to the 1989 invasion to make sure that control of the canal was maintained, to today's economic levers of control, the US has had its hand on the reins. There is an excellent documentary The Panama Deception which is well worth the effort to find (or purchase) and watch. It discusses both the history between the US and Panama, and the 1989 invasion.

So oil, both as cargo and as the fuel of a globalized economy, mixes with the dwindling waters of Panama to the long term good of corporations and the long term ill of Panamanians and the environment. I certainly wish this was a unique story. Unfortunately, it is only an illustration of a much broader pattern.

Note: this article was update from an earlier article by Rowan Wolf