Hollund Industrial Marine Inc. (HIMR)

[sastolfi]

From Panama News -

Isn't this the River that HIMR was saying they were working on a contract for?

http://www.thepanamanews.com/pn/v_19/issue_01/economy_17.html

Canadian company gets the permit it needed to recover valuable submerged wood
Company and comarca embark on multi-million-dollar venture

Over the holidays the National Environmental Authority (ANAM) issued a permit that a company from the Canadian province of British Columbia had been pursuing for some time. Coast Eco Timber now has 15 years to harvest about 15,000 hectares of woodlands that were submerged when the Bayano River was dammed for a hydroelectric project in the 1970s. There are all sorts of daunting logistical challenges and market vagaries, but this concession will likely be producing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of boards, some of them of species that are scarce on today's market.

It is now known to be a bad practice to flood vegetated areas without largely clearing them first as it lowers the amount of water that may be retained behind a dam and creates greenhouse gases from the decomposition of much of the plant material. But although the trees die, much of the tropical timber flooded in such dam projects is preserved by the waters and can be harvested and used decades later. Much of the wood in Gatun Lake, which was flooded a century ago to make the Panama Canal, is still quite valuable and harvestable.

There have been prior concessions at Gatun Lake, which have been a prototype of how the harvest of submerged trees can be a logistical and economic failure. However, Gatun Lake is also serving as the watery "dry run" for how Coast Eco Timber will operate at Lake Bayano. Logs were harvested from 1,000 hectares of a previously existing Gatun Lake concession and taken to the company's sawmill in Chepo district, a process that brought in money while the larger permit application was pending and allowed the company to find and train the core of a work force.

Much of that labor force comes from the Madugandi Comarca, a semi-autonomous Guna commonwealth along the shores of Lake Bayano. The creation of that lake is still a sore spot with the displaced indigenous people and their progeny because they were forced out of the most fertile garden spots and best hunting and gathering forests and obliged to move to less productive areas, with little or no compensation. That 1970s experience was noticed by all of Panama's indigenous groups and accounts for some of the furious resistance that development projects face in other parts of the country. But Coast Eco Timber reached an agreement with the hardscrabble comarca to share the proceeds of the venture and to hire Guna workers in a place where there aren't very many jobs. The company employs about 80 people now, and with the start of operations in Lake Bayano is expected to quickly expand its work force to 120.

The plan is to saw many of the recovered trees into boards at an expanded sawmill, and to sell other unprocessed logs to a Chinese company that will process them overseas.