USA Little Rock Arkansas – Baxter County student goes to Panama with ACE program

Hannah Dooley, a senior from Baxter County, recently returned from Panama after participating in the ACE Panama Tour, an international trade and innovation exchange sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce.  The tour, part of the Americas Competitiveness Exchange (ACE) program, brought together delegates from across the Western Hemisphere to explore economic and agricultural initiatives in Panama. The weeklong trip aimed to foster collaboration between countries through site visits and firsthand experiences with regional industries.  Baxter County is a county in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas.  Created as Arkansas’s 66th county on March 24, 1873, the county has eight incorporated municipalities, including Mountain Home, its largest city and county seat. The county is named for Elisha Baxter, the tenth governor of Arkansas.

Dooley’s itinerary included visits to farms and facilities across Panama, beginning with a pineapple farm in Santiago on Monday, followed by a sugarcane refinery tour the next day. On Wednesday, the group traveled to Boquete to visit a coffee farm and processing facility, which included a tasting. Thursday featured a tour of a local flower farm before the delegation returned to Panama City to tour the Panama Canal on Friday. The tour concluded Saturday when the group returned to Little Rock.  Dooley says she has learned a lot from 4H and encourages anyone interested to get involved.  The ACE program, managed by the Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration, aims to build networks that support trade, investment, and innovation across the Americas.