Canal Expansion (Source) PANAMA CITY, Oct 19 (Reuters) - The Panama Canal, one of the engineering wonders of the world, will receive the biggest facelift in its 92-year history if Panamanians approve a plan to widen and deepen the waterway at a referendum on Sunday. Opinion polls show around two-thirds of people approve the government’s proposal for a $5.25-billion overhaul to allow increasingly large tankers to pass between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. President Martin Torrijos has billed the referendum as Panama’s most important vote since it became independent from Colombia in 1903 but opponents warn it could bankrupt the small nation if costs spiral. Supporters of the expansion, planned to begin in 2008, hope it will bring a jobs bonanza for Panama’s 3 million people, most of whom live in poverty. “We have to think about our children, their future,” said Carlos Sanjur, a truck driver who supports the expansion plan. “It is progress and will bring jobs and investment.”
Opened in 1914 at a cost of $375 million and 25,000 lives, the canal ranks alongside France’s Eiffel Tower, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the English Channel Tunnel as one of the world’s most stunning engineering feats.
Rosetta Stone
Dynamited and dug out by thousands of mainly Caribbean laborers who braved deadly malaria and yellow fever, the canal saves ships a long haul around South America’s treacherous Cape Horn and carries around 4 percent of world trade.
Its lock system is too small for many modern tankers.
Ships making the passage, mainly from the United States, Japan, China and Chile, also face longer waits these days to make the 50-mile (80-km) inter-oceanic trip as global shipping grows, partly due to the Asian economic boom.
The Panama Canal Authority, or ACP, which runs the waterway, warns the route will become log-jammed in seven years if nothing is done, meaning business will be lost to competitors like the U.S. intermodal system of ports and cross-country rail links.
The current plan would double capacity, with new sets of wider locks and deeper and bigger access channels, and let ships with 12,000 containers pass through, up from a present limit of around 4,000 containers.
CRITICS SAY TOO RISKY
But opponents say the size of the expansion is too risky for Panama, which is already saddled with a high debt burden, and if costs overrun, taxpayers could be forced to pick up the tab and investors lose money.
“I can’t believe anything the government says. If they need my land for the expansion, they will just change the law,” said peasant Felipe Murillo at a street protest against the canal expansion.
The project, due to be finished in 2014, needs $2.3 billion in loans or bonds to be paid back with revenues from higher tolls from ships using the canal, which would not be interrupted during the upgrade. Construction would create 7,000 jobs and up to 40,000 indirect jobs.
France’s Ferdinand de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal, started the Panama Canal in 1880 but abandoned it nine years later when the project went bankrupt.
The U.S. government bought the canal in 1904 and 10 years later opened the waterway. With an eye on naval supremacy and control of the Western Hemisphere, the United States ran the canal for most of last century.
In treaties signed in 1977 by then U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Panama’s populist dictator, Gen. Omar Torrijos, father of the current elected president, the United States agreed to hand over the canal to Panama in 1999.
ACP administrator Alberto Aleman said Panama long aspired to own the canal and after taking it over the country has run it well. “If the canal is expanded, tomorrow’s generation will see that as the canal grows, we all grow.”
But the canal has rivals. Nicaragua has recently revived plans to build its own inter-oceanic canal for $18 billion.
SOURCE: Don Winner @ Panama-guide.com
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Source: VIP Panama