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Total U.S. seaborne cargo exports, 2008: 486 million tons
Shipped via Panama Canal: 72 million tons
Panama's modest export data show $280 million in sales to the United States last year, mixing $97 million worth of shrimp and fish with oil, pineapples and gold. The total is the equivalent of six hours' worth of imports from Canada. The other side of the ledger is larger and more varied. America's $5 billion in exports to Panama -- energy, airplanes, arcade-type video game machines, corn, telecom equipment and perfume -- have tripled since 2004, now making Panama a market comparable to mid-size European countries like Poland and Sweden. Panama's perfume market in particular seems to be strikingly large: Panamanians buy about 1.7 tons of American perfume a year, as much as France or the UK, and more than China, Brazil or Japan.
The combination of low imports with high and rising exports makes Panama, despite its small size, the US' 8th-largest trade surplus partner worldwide. But as Congress prepares to debate on a U.S.-Panama free trade agreement, the country's most significant role in American trade remains in shipping and logistics.
Last year, 73 million tons of American seaborne cargo transited the Panama Canal: Gulf Coast chemicals and grain bound for China, Korea and Japan; California manufactures and foods for Brazil and Europe, and so on. This was more than a seventh of the US' 486 million tons of outbound goods. (About 62 million tons of goods came to the U.S. through the Canal, in particular Asian manufactures along with farm goods and metal ores from South America meant for Gulf and Atlantic ports.) In total, Canal managers last year recorded 13,147 ship transits -- 36 per day -- among them 76 Navy vessels, 1,916 tankers, 3,544 container ships, 260 vehicle carriers, 240 passenger liners and 237 fishing boats and so on.
In total, these ships carried about 210 million of the 8 billion tons of world seaborne cargo. A decade from now, the Canal's share of world shipping will probably be larger rather than smaller, as it is now being expanded for a world of larger ships. The largest ships today's 95-year-old Canal can accommodate, known as "Panamax" class, are 965 feet long by 106 wide and 40 feet in draft. A container ship of this size can carry about 5,000 twenty-foot containers. Larger "post-Panamax" ships are too big for the locks: Emma Maersk-size container ships with 12,000-container capacity, Navy supercarriers, the largest supertankers built for crude oil and liquefied natural gas. Accordingly in 2007, the Panamanian government launched construction of a third set of locks, able to accommodate ships of 1200 x 180 feet with 60 foot draft. This would be enough for the 12,000-container ships which are now the largest on the water. The $5.5 billion construction job, said to be the world's third-biggest current construction project, is scheduled for completion by 2015.
Introductions to the US-Panama FTA -
Home-page for the Panama Canal, with material on the expansion project: http://www.pancanal.com/
eng/index.html
The U.S. Navy uses the Canal for transit about once a week. A case in point:
http://www.navy.mil/search/
display.asp?story_id=30519
The Energy Department on Panama as an oil and natural gas transit point:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/World_Oil_
Transit_Chokepoints/Panama_Canal.html
And some hope for frogs -- Panama has an outsized role not only in shipping and perfume-buying but in frog-protection. Home to 0.05 percent of the world's people, Panama is also the home of 198 of its 5743 amphibian species. Panama finds its frogs threatened by the global chytrid fungus plague. Amphibian experts from the Smithsonian's National Zoo, other zoos and environmental groups join in an attempt to keep chytrid out of eastern Panama:
http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Publications/PressMaterials/PressReleases/
NZP/2009/amphibians/default.cfm
