Word: canalized
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Alemán's more lucrative changes was creating different cargo classes for toll charges (container, tanker, passenger, etc.), which has had the dual effect of augmenting revenues while presenting users with a fairer fee structure. The new authority also designed a more efficient transit-reservation system: a canal passage that often entailed a wait of several days at the canal's entrance a decade ago takes less than a day now, increasing throughput...
Still, the biggest problem is traffic jams: more than 14,000 ships transit the canal each year, stretching its outdated capacity. And a growing share of that freight can't cross Panama at all. By 2010, the number of post-Panamax vessels in the global commercial fleet is expected to jump 74%, to about 700, and by 2011, they will probably account for half the world's oceangoing commercial-cargo capacity, according to the World Shipping Council in Washington. The expansion design, approved by Panama's Congress last spring, would dig a new approach channel about five miles long just...
Toll increases would pay the expansion's $5.25 billion projected cost, about half of which would be financed by international banks. Alemán estimates the increased traffic could raise the canal's annual income to as much as $5 billion...
...many Panamanians feel Torrijos and the project's backers are "looking through rose-colored glasses," says Fernando Manfredo, the canal's former deputy administrator and a leader of the anti-expansion campaign. Among their fears: increasing Panama's already sizable foreign debt, now more than $10 billion, or about 60% of GDP; other credible estimates indicate the expansion's cost would be closer to $8 billion; and uncertainties, like a possible downturn in Asia's economies, which could deflate the promised benefits. "Our big concern," says Manfredo, "is whether we'll really recuperate what we're going to throw into...
...politicians still bring that tradition to projects like this, which is why Torrijos has begun long overdue anticorruption measures like contract-bidding reforms. He knows that even if voters endorse the expansion, it's likely to be judged less by how well it digs supersize ships into the canal than by how well it digs Panama out of its Third World troubles...