Jamaica Post to raise postal fees by 50 percent

Jamaica Post will raise postal rates by up to 50 per cent next month, and the government will be moving to regulate ‘private letter operators’ as well as the wider bulk mail industry as it moves to increase the Postal Corporation’s earnings. Commerce, Science and Technology Minister Phillip Paulwell hopes these measures will help the Postal Corporation of Jamaica break even by 2006. When the rate increase takes effect, the cost of mailing a single letter within the island by using regular mail service will rise from 15 dollars to 30 dollars. The cost of mailing a letter to Europe will move from 45 dollars to 60 dollars. With the new rate scale, the annual projected revenue for the Postal Corporation is 849 million dollars, but is still well below its more than $1 billion a year operational costs. According to the Postal Corporation of Jamaica, its bottom line is being affected by the increasing number of private letter operators who bypass the postal system. “Private letter operators are organized groups of men on bicycles who get a contract to deliver monthly bills for a company. They don’t mail it. A growing portion of the postal market is being eroded by private persons who do delivery,” postmaster-general Dr Blossom O’Meally-Nelson told the Observer last night. While it is not illegal for a company to use messengers to deliver small quantities of mail, she said, using a third party is against the law. According to Minister Paulwell, because of the low cost of mailing items from Jamaica it has become commonplace for some US companies to use the island as a distribution point for bulk mail, such as catalogues and magazines. “Jamaica has become a dumping ground for mail. It is cheaper for the US to send bulk mail into Jamaica and remail it, than if it was mailed directly from the US,” he told the Observer yesterday. “This price increase is to prevent that from happening as well.”