By IPS Correspondents
PANAMA CITY, May 31 1998 (IPS)

Landless peasants have settled into temporary villages on the west bank of the Panama Canal in a successful effort to produce food crops in areas covered by so- called “canal grass.”

Some 250 farmers have organized 13 cooperatives which have each been granted 20 hectares of land from the government. The project is part of a national effort to end the traditional “slash and burn” practice of peasants who invade forest lands near the canal each year to grow food.

In Panama, 37.8 percent of the countrys 2.7 million inhabitants live in conditions of absolute poverty. Moreover, poverty afflicts 16 percent of urban dwellers, 63 percent of those living in rural areas, and is as high as 90 percent in indigenous regions of the country.

In 1913, American engineers brought in a fast-growing grass from Vienam to halt soil erosion on land adjacent to the canal whose forest covering had been removed. The grass helped avoid the collapse of the banks of the canal, but its lightweight seeds soon spread to large expanses of land near the canal, which until that point had not been used for agricultural purposes.

forest technician Rene Chang told IPS.

Now the idea is that crops grown by the landless peasants will provide some measure of control over any further spread of the tough canal grass, according to Sayda Grimaldo, head of the department of environmental control of the Interoceanic Region Authority (ARI).

ARI is a government agency charged with administering the land returned by the United States to Panama as mandated by the canal treaties signed in 1977.

Farming methods to eliminate the grass consists of cutting or burning-out the canal grass and planting rapidly growing plants, such as the native mocuna, on the cleared land in order to create shadows that impede the grass fr om growing.

According to experiments carried out with the canal grass on the agricultural f arm Rio Cabuya, which belongs to the nongovernmental National Association of Nature Conservation (Ancon), creating shade is a sure way to kill the resistant roots of the grass, which can grows as high as three metres.

Gertrudis Gomez, a peasant and treasurer of the Nuevo Emperador Cooperative, which ARI ceded to a group of farmers, said that one year after initiating the cleanup of her two-hectare parcel of land, she has grown beans, cucumbers, chilis and rice. However, the land was not fertile enough to produce corn, and the planted crops died, she said.

“Last year I battled the canal grass all year long. First I worked a small piece of land, I burned the grass, then I planted mocuna and then, underneath it, I planted the new seeds,” she explained.

Another of the new settlers, Urbano Romas, said “when we arrived at our parcel in Bajo Bandera, it was filled with the white (canal) grass and we immediately began to work with the mocuna. Now the land has gotten better and we have cultivated corn, rice, coffee and papaya.”

Ramos said that he and other landless peasants of Bajo Bandera cleared their 20 hectares of land and, with the guidance of government experts was soon able to produce crops. Similar work was carried out by eight peasants of the agricultural farm of Santa Clara, on land also ceded by ARI, according to farmer Candida Moran.

“The project has been a real success to date and even the drought has not affected us,” she said. Others were not so lucky as the drought, blamed on the El Nino weather phenomenon, has affected some 53,000 families in the central area of the country, who required state assistance after losing their crops.

The administrator of ARI, former Panamanian president Nicolas Ardito Barletta, said that in order for the project to clear the land of the canal grass, similar projects must be implemented that give new opportunities of development and employment t o the population.

The handing over of land to peasants located on the banks of the canal is part of a plan for the use land returned to Panama by the canal treaties, which also mandates the construction of industrial parks, hotels, tourist centers and centres of higher education.

The canal, the military bases, the infrastructure and the 1,400 square kms of land that comprise the old canal zone administered by the United States up to 1979, are valued at approximately 30 billion dollars.

The interoceanic transport route, land, structures for civilian use and six military bases which remain in the hands of the United States should be returned to Panamanian jurisdiction on December 31, 1999, according to the terms of the 1977 treaties.

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