and the outlook for 2022 with the return of schools and the opening up of the entertainment industry indicated that companies would benefit from their cost reduction exercises and would much better sales and profits. But that has now been tampered by logistical problems. “In early 2021, we started to see a massive increase in the cost of trade out of the Far East and that was bad enough. But the last quarter of 2021 up to now, we are seeing a shortage of containers to the Caribbean much worse than it has been in the past. It may be that shipping lines are looking at where they can make more money and diverting more of their available shipping space to the North American market, at the expense of some of the smaller Caribbean islands.And in general where they have to go first to the U.S. and then come to Jamaica. “We’re seeing that change starting to affect not only importers but manufacturers, where you’re trying to source raw materials and packaging materials and it’s not coming through. We had a serious shortage of items such as glass bottles, aluminum cans, tops 24 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN VOLUME 11, ISSUE 08
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