Jamaica Barrel Traffic Clue to Bad Times

When Jamaicans on the North American mainland roll out the barrels, it’s a sign of bad times here at home.

Jamaicans in the United States and Canada are sending freight drums of clothing and food to relatives impoverished by low pay, 80% inflation and the removal of subsidies from basic goods.

The squeeze began when Jamaica, like the Dominican Republic and other Caribbean nations, inaugurated a “structural readjustment” program intended to make it more competitive in world markets.

Every weekday, people line up outside Kingston port warehouses long before the gates open, waiting to collect the barrels addressed to them.

“These days, we cannot buy food, so they buy it,” Beulah Brown, 32, said of the overseas relatives. She was calling for three barrels shipped by her father from Brooklyn, N.Y.

Brown has seven children. As she spread the contents along a counter for customs inspection, she said her father’s help kept the family going.

“Some people don’t have anything at all, and”--she paused, looking at her sacks of flour, the laundry detergent, cans of condensed milk--”and they don’t have anyone to help them, either.”

Peter Callen, manager of the Universal Freight Warehouse, said the barrels stir memories of the 1970s, a time of economic chaos and gang violence when tens of thousands of skilled workers left the island.

“When times are hard, families and relatives abroad tend to send barrels with food and clothes to their families,” he said. “It happened in the bad ‘70s and it’s happening again. There’d be even more barrels here now if there was not a recession in the United States.”

Callen said the Christmas traffic was the busiest he had seen, up by more than half from the year before. He said thousands of people had lined up on some days and the warehouse often stayed open past midnight.

Business was up more than 20% early in 1992 over the same period of 1991, he said. The great majority of shipments to Jamaica’s 2.4 million people come from the United States or Canada, where most of the estimated 2 million emigres live.

Prime Minister Percival J. Patterson has cited halting inflation and stabilizing the Jamaican dollar as two priorities. The currency has slid from 5.5 to the U.S. dollar in 1989 to 29 in late April.

Political analysts praise Jamaican officials for trying to trim the bureaucracy and encourage private enterprise. But they also note reduced earnings from tourism, bauxite and bananas, the three main sources of income, and the increasing economic role of remittances from abroad.

“If you just went with the absolute information, you would wonder why there isn’t a revolution,” said David Lewis, Puerto Rico’s government representative for Caribbean affairs. “But you’re talking about a people who don’t have illusions of a quick upswing in the economy.”