PANAMA CITY, Oct 23: The Panamanian government celebrated on Monday after voters backed a $5.25-billion plan to widen the country’s transcontinental canal to allow the world’s biggest ships to sail between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

With nearly all the votes counted, election officials announced over 78 per cent of the voters had approved the plan calling for construction of a third set of locks and other modernization work along the waterway.

Only about 22 per cent voiced opposition in the course of the referendum, the officials said.

“Today we have become the masters of our own destiny,” an elated President Martin Torrijos said in an address to the nation. “Today, we have laid the foundation of a better country.”

Turnout barely reached 40 per cent, but officials blamed that in part on a televised soccer match between rivals Barcelona and Real Madrid.

“We’ve gotten a clear mandate,” Jorge Quijano, the Canal Authority’s maritime operations director, told The New York Times . “We now have an opportunity to continue to grow.”

Torrijos and the Canal Authority, the government agency that has run the waterway since it was handed over to Panama by the United States in 1999, insisted that not widening the 92-year-old waterway would leave it obsolete after 2012.

About 80 per cent of the gross domestic product of Panama, which has a population of three million, is linked directly or indirectly to canal activity, with the waterway’s main users being the United States, China and Japan.

Proponents say the canal, through which roughly four per cent of world trade passes, badly needs an overhaul to accommodate new, larger ships and remain competitive against other maritime routes.—AFP