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Care Packages Prove Essential For Haiti's Poor
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Published: August 23, 2008
MIAMI - Nadia Renaud began shipping bags of rice, beans and other foodstuffs last spring to struggling relatives in Haiti, helping her brother ease the worries of providing for a sick mother who needs constant care.
At first the shipments were a welcome addition for her loved ones in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country. Now they've become the family's lifeline amid worsening hunger, soaring food prices and a lack of arable land in the deforested island nation.
Renaud's brother and sister-in-law eke out livings as market vendors in Haiti's northwest coastal town of Port-de-Paix. But food has become too expensive and too scarce, and the couple now cannot afford many basic staples.
"Everything there is so expensive. They say, 'Even if you are only sending something small, send it. Anything you have, send it, because we cannot afford it,'" said Renaud, 34, who oversees exports to Haiti for Trujillo & Sons Inc., a food distributor.
Renaud is among Haitians living in Miami and other U.S. cities who have been sending food regularly to their families in the Caribbean nation, where six Haitians and a U.N. peacekeeper died during April food riots.
Surveying a 25-pound bag of rice, beans, cooking oil, sugar and cases of bottled juice and ramen noodles stacked on a shipping pallet this month, Renaud lamented the fact that she can only send a shipment every few weeks.
Food transfers parallel cash remittances to Haiti and a handful of other countries, including Cuba and Guyana, where commodities are often expensive and hard to find. Companies that deliver the food into Haiti say orders spiked after the riots.
Because some people purchase and ship the goods themselves, instead of working through a transfer service, there is no reliable estimate on the amount sent through such shipments, known as barrel remittances, said Robert Meins, a remittance specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank.
Still, about $1.83 billion in remittances were sent to Haiti last year, amounting to about 35 percent of the country's gross domestic product, according to the IDB. The average sender remitted $150, 10 times a year, to cover daily expenses such as food, housing, utilities, clothing and medicine.
Such cash transfers aren't buying what they once did in Haiti. Gas recently topped $6 a gallon as food prices rose more than 40 percent in a country where about 80 percent of the 8.7 million residents live on less than $2 a day. Hunger is rampant, and one in five Haitian children is chronically undernourished, according to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization.
Some poor Haitians even resort to eating a mix of yellow dirt and vegetable shortening to ward off hunger, and some remote farmers consume the very seeds need to grow future crops.
The April riots led the U.S. government and U.N. World Food Program to pledge a total of $117 million in food and agricultural aid. But by early July, less than 2 percent had been distributed, according to a U.S. Agency for International Development report.
Food shipments from relatives abroad help fill the gap.
Beatrice Bonenfant, a 37-year-old health administrator from Plantation, regularly sent money for more than a decade to her father, aunt and cousins in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. Two years ago, her relatives asked her to begin sending food instead as rising prices began putting many items beyond reach. They also worried about neighborhood robberies that made it risky to carry too much cash.
Bonenfant now has rice, cooking oil and tomato paste delivered each month to her relatives' home.
"It's safer, that's what they told me," Bonenfant said.
There are various ways to get the food to Haiti.
Caribbean Airmail Inc., a Miami-based agency, provides customers with a list of cooking staples, including rice, beans, vegetable oil and cornmeal, and can ship the food to families throughout Haiti.
In a rundown hill district above Port-au-Prince, 29-year-old Yolande Coriolan recently told The Associated Press she and her 48-year-old mother depend on the food and money sent by her boyfriend, a 31-year-old electrician in Miami.
"Sometimes all we have is the food that he sends, until I get paid for my job and I can buy the things that I need," said Coriolan, who makes $200 a month tutoring students to read and write Haitian Creole. She said it now costs twice that to buy enough food each month.
"The way things are going, thank God I have him," said Coriolan, who receives oil, rice, beans and other staples through Caribbean Airmail Inc.
Orders through the Miami office of Unitransfer, which delivers items such as rice, flour, milk and spaghetti throughout Haiti, increased 22 percent in the first half of the year, said Jean-Marc Piquion, its vice president of sales and marketing.
But Haitians in the United States also have had to cope with rising prices, limiting what they can ship. Many Haitians who once bought supplies stopped when shipping costs tripled and the price of a bag of rice rose from $22 in January to $51 this month, Renaud said.
Marie Larose, who is seeking work as a cleaning woman, said she can no longer afford the $40 or $50 she used to pay to ship a large box of rice, canned goods, sugar and flour to relatives back home.
"They keep calling and calling," the 67-year-old Miami woman said. "They say they are hungry. There is nothing I can do."
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