By Michael Spence
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Michael Spence
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Presently, there are 750,000 to 900,000 Jamaicans living in squatter or irregular settlements. When you add people on “family land” with no title, and those paying to squat/rent, 1.5M or more is a fair estimate. 40% of all parcels of land have no registered titles. That’s 350,000 properties locked up as “dead capital” that cannot be used as collateral for wealth creation.
10% of the population controls 60% of the wealth—including most of the titled, valuable land. The government owns 1,080,000 acres.
Let's take a look at history. In 1838 Emancipation freed an estimated 400,000 African slaves but gave them no land and no money.
Our ancestors became internal migrants and squatters on hills and “waste lands.”
The Baptist Church free villages like Sligoville in St. Catherine and Bethel Town in Westmoreland were rare efforts to actually give freed people plots. It helped but didn’t change the system.
Do the math. If the government gave 2 square chains (0.2 acre) to each of 1.5M people, that’s 300,000 acres total. That would still leave 780,000 acres of Crown/Government land. So, land for housing/liveable space is there. The barrier is policy, cost, and bureaucracy, not acreage.
The risk is that if the state doesn’t distribute, then local elites, plus foreign buyers from China, the US, the UK, and others, will keep buying up tourism, energy, and coastal land. That’s the “new colonization” I am warning about.
Emancipation without land left most Jamaicans free but landless. Until those 1.5M people get titles, the economy will remain lopsided.
“WHO OWNS JAMAICA?” You decide.
Michael Spence
Michael Spence is a graduate of Cornwall College and the University of the West Indies. He is a trained teacher, a sociologist, and a writer for Bark Di Trute.
Micspen2@hotmail.com
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