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Outside Magazine September 2004

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Panama's Darién Gap
An Impossible Place To Be (Cont.)


	Clear cuts near Boca de Cupe, a village in Darién National Park (Alex Webb)

WAR CAN BE GOOD for the environment—sometimes. In Poland during World War II, the wolf population increased substantially, and the Vietnam War gave the Vietnamese tiger an opportunity to rebound. One obvious benefit of armed conflict is that it scares people away from forest they might otherwise destroy.

Because of its proximity to the equator and its location between the continents, the Gap features an unusual mix of creatures, such as crab-eating foxes, brocket deer, and pumas, as well as an extraordinary level of biodiversity that includes at least 2,400 plant species and more than 900 species of mammals and birds. "There's nothing like it," says Líder Sucre, of ANCON. "No other rainforest in Central America is as well-preserved."

The trade-off is that Panama lacks access to South America and has no control over its own eastern border. Thirty years ago, the U.S. government decided this was an unacceptable situation. It provided more than $100 million to build a section of the Pan-American Highway connecting Panama to Colombia. The rest of the highway was already complete, stretching from Alaska to the southern tip of Chile.

The physical obstacles were daunting, including swamps deep enough to sink a ten-story building. Nevertheless, it wasn't the terrain but a virus, foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), that kept the project from going forward.

FMD is the doomsday plague of the livestock industry, an illness whose outbreak can shake global stock markets. Most recently, an epidemic of FMD ravaged England in 2001, causing more than $7 billion in economic losses. No cases of the disease have been reported in Panama, and the last U.S. outbreak occurred in 1929. But in Colombia, FMD was endemic during the 1970s and remains present today.

Inside the park, we're in a triple-tiered canopy—the rarest of jungle settings. Vásquez points out the footprint of a puma. It's like walking into a dark room and realizing that you've stumbled into a cathedral.

"If FMD were to invade Central America, it could have very rapid access to the United States," says Harold Hofmann, 61, associate regional director of the U.S. Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), an agency within the Department of Agriculture that's charged with protecting the U.S. food supply from pests and diseases. "Therefore, the government's plan is to keep it as far away as we can."

Because of concerns about FMD, in 1975 the highway plan was challenged in court by groups including the Sierra Club. The project was eventually scrapped. Meanwhile, yielding to pressure from the U.S., the Panamanian government established Darién National Park, in 1981, as a way to carve out a cattle-free zone in the jungle. Today, APHIS's $4.5 million regional budget covers the salaries of 90 Panamanian livestock inspectors who patrol the country looking for sick cattle. It also funds the battle against another potentially catastrophic South American scourge, the screwworm, whose larvae consume the flesh of live cattle, which can lead to fatal secondary infections. To control the insect, the agency drops a sterile male version of it from airplanes, in batches of 40 million, over the region every week.

"If screwworm got loose in the U.S., the effect on producers would be about $800 million lost per year," says Hofmann. "Foot-and-mouth would far exceed that. It's a very dangerous disease—something we all fear."

The good news is that Panama remains free of FMD and appears close to eliminating the screwworm; the bad news is that over the past 15 years the jungle on the Colombian side has shrunk.

"There's nothing left but cattle ranches," says ANCON's Sucre.

Meanwhile, the forest on Panama's side is dwindling, too, thanks to an influx of Panamanian farmers drawn by the opening of the Pan-American Highway from Panama City to Yaviza, in 1988. Since then, eastern Panama's population has doubled, and essentially every acre of forest not on a mountainside is in danger of being cut down or burned—which is what makes protecting the park so vital.

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