Benefits To The Surrounding Community Futuro Forestal is now employing 50 full-time workers and 80 seasonal workers. This has allowed families in the area to stay in Las Lajas and not migrate out of the region to Panama City or to the regional capital of David. The project has also helped farmers in the area learn about the benefits of reforestation. Hopefully, what the farmers learn at the project will change the way they farm, specifically not to cut down or burn trees. If the farmers can see there is money in preserving the environment, then they will be able to stay on the land and not become landless urban workers who can’t feed themselves. This process of change in agricultural practices is not dissimiliar to what happened in Costa Rica 30 or 40 years ago: people stopped burning, stopped migrating to the city, and started to realize that protecting the natural enviroment meant food and money. Panama is just beginning this process. Most rural farmers in Panama have a hard time making a living in the countryside, most have large families and most see their children leave the countryside and go to Panama City to look for work, so the family structure in rural Panama is breaking down because the agricultural base or natural resource base of the countryside is so depeleted. If you go to the Panamanian countryside today you see mostly very old people and very young children who are left with their grandparents by young mothers who work in Panama City as domestic servants. |
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What I believe would be good is that people in the countryside of Panama have to find a way to reclaim land that has been destroyed because of poor agricultural practices. The first step in reclaiming denuded and barren land is reforestation, but reforestation that promotes biodiversity and not monoculture. In short, there has to be a migration from the urban areas back to the countryside and when this happens there must be some new agricultural system that is in place that will allow the population to survive on the land without destroying it. Reforestation now will help this process along later and what Futuro Forestal is doing in Las Lajas is planting the idea in the surrounding community about how to reforest and how do it in a way that is profitable and will allow people to stay together in the countryside and become prosperous farmers.
Farming was
a prosperous acitivity in Panama in the past. Before roads were extended
into the deep interior of the country, people had to produce to feed themselves.
But when roads penetrated deep into the countryside, the road in became
the road out and people started pouring out of the countryside to the city
and when that happened agriculture and an instinct for natural resource
management suffered. Food was shipped into these remote areas because of
the new roads. Before the roads were cut it was difficult for people from
outside these small rural communites, with names like Pan Dulce, Comensito
and
Agua
de Salud, to reach them - they could only fly to the towns by light
airplane. At that time, all the small towns had markets on Sunday at which
people from the countryside and the local aristocracy bought their food
- there was no food trucked in. Reforestation is the first step in improving
agriculture and hopefully change people's feelings about seeing the importance
of the enviroment as something from the dark past.
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Investing
In Panama
The advantage of investing in Panama is that it has become very politically stable over the last 14 years and the U.S. has a vested interest in seeing this incredibly important country stay stable. As an investor you have the benefit of having modern services in Panama, especially modern banking services. There are over 150 banks in Panama for a country that probably has 200,000 people who could put money in the bank; in other words, there is a lot of foreign money in Panama and in order to protect the inflow of foreign money, banks have to treat investors well. The banking laws that made Panama an offshore haven were passed by Omar Torrijos in 1970: those laws stated that there would be no tax on interest from any kind of account. Offshore business deals would be tax-free. No laws or restrictions on the setting of interest rates. Money could move in and out of the country freely. Numbered accounts rather than named accounts: Switzerland in the tropics it was called. Another reason why Panama became a banking center was the fact that the U.S. dollar is used as the national currency as well as the fact that Panama is in the same time-zone as Wall Street – making its banking hours identical to New York. |
Types Of Businesses You Might Start In Panama
The place is
swarming with great lawyers who are very inexpensive and for the most part
honest. Now what kind of business would you want to open? A lot of people
that are relocating to Panama are opening Internet based businesses, from
clothes to tourism. Tourism has taken off over the last two years in Panama,
though the tourist infrastructure in the country is still underdeveloped,
especially the marketing of tourism. Another type of investor are those
working in e-commerce, selling real estate in Panama through the Internet
or shipping products out of Panama’s Duty-Free Zone to the world. For trading
Panama is in an excellent position: perfect location between North and
South America, there are great storage facilities in Panama as well as
easy shipment of merchandise, you have a large duty-free zone from which
any product can be assembled and sold in the region. Most people that trade
out of Panama buy their goods in China, from China they ship merchandise
to Panama’s duty-free zone and from the free zone they ship to other countries
in Latin America, say, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Ecuador or wherever.
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