🇵🇦 The cattle breeds of Panama

Panama keeps a modest cattle herd of about 1.36 million head, grazed on pastures carved from former forest. Beef is their main product and a small but steady export earner, though the country's farming is better known for bananas, shrimp, sugar and rice. Cattle sit alongside poultry and pigs in a livestock sector that yielded about three tenths of farm value in the mid-1980s.

• Some 1,362,000 cattle were counted in Panama in 1997.
• About 321,000 were slaughtered that year and 5,280 sent abroad live.
• Pasture covers 1.2 million hectares, nearly all of it once forest.
• Only 40 breeding cattle were imported in 1997.
• Beef exports earned 7.8 million dollars against 1.4 million in imports in 1997.

Cattle in Panama

Cattle keeping in Panama is a modest thread in a farm economy better known for bananas, shrimp, sugar and rice. The national herd stood at about 1.36 million head in 1997, grazing on roughly 1.2 million hectares of pasture, nearly all of it ground that once carried forest. Beef and veal lead the livestock products, with chicken and pork alongside, and beef ranks among the country's farm exports. The trade leans towards the home table: that same year about 321,000 cattle were slaughtered, a little over five thousand live animals were sold abroad, and only forty breeding cattle were brought in. All livestock together accounted for just under a third of the value added by agriculture in the mid-1980s, and many small farmers keep animals within a largely subsistence way of farming.

Milk, butter and beef

Beef is the headline product of Panama's cattle, with veal beside it, and both are named among the country's main livestock outputs. Meat trade figures stay modest: beef products worth 7.8 million dollars left the country in 1997, against 1.4 million dollars brought in, and only a few thousand live animals went abroad. Beef appears on the lists of principal farm exports, though its earnings sit far below bananas, shrimp, sugar and coffee. Within the wider livestock sector, cattle take their place beside poultry and pigs, and Panamanians eat more chicken per head than anyone else in Latin America, which shapes how much room beef has on the plate.

Today

At the turn of the century Panama counted about 1.36 million cattle, and beef ranked among the country's smaller farm exports. The herd relied little on imported breeding stock, with just forty animals brought in during 1997. Nearly all pasture was once forest, and forest has kept retreating: timber cutting now draws tighter rules, after the country lost just over two percent of its woods each year in the 1990s. With fisheries included, farming stood at 7.4 percent of GDP in 2009.