Contributed
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Michael Spence
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Jamaica holds a singular and contested place in the Caribbean. Unlike Barbados, St. Kitts-Nevis, Trinidad, Cuba, and most other islands, where the public has established rights of access and use of beaches.
Jamaica is the only country in the region where citizens still do not have a clear, guaranteed right to freely access the coastline.
What should be a public common good has instead been enclosed by hotels, villas, and gated developments. This is not simply tourism policy. It is a continuation of dispossession.
Under Jamaican law, the foreshore, that is the strip between the high and low water marks, is Crown land legally and belongs to the public.
The Beach Control Act of 1956 gave government control over the foreshore and seabed, but access has depended on licenses and permissions, not on an inherent right. The Act “does not give Jamaicans any inherent right to beach access. This is “the product of a colonial mindset”. It is scamming.
In March 2026, Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness tabled the final Beach Access and Management Policy, the first attempt in decades to address the issue.
The policy “still stops short of clearly guaranteeing Jamaicans the right to freely access the country’s coastline." Some academics, lobby groups and enlightened MPs argue that it treats access as “managed permission rather than a fundamental public right."
The government’s stated goal/compromise is at least one public recreational beach per parish, but the rights of existing titleholders and license holders will be expressly protected.
The beach question cannot be separated from the land question.
At Emancipation 1834-1838 311,000-450,000 enslaved Jamaicans were "freed", but received no land or compensation. The land “remained, in every legal and practical sense, someone else’s”.
Colonial policy deliberately kept Crown land priced out of reach at £1 per acre, roughly two weeks’ wages, to prevent labourers from buying it. That pattern persists.
The state remains the largest holder of land. “A colonial vestige/relic that denies citizens equity."
Today, Jamaica has approximately 800 informal settlements housing over 850,000 people, equivalent to about 30% of the country’s population.
Earlier estimates placed squatters at 500,000 in 2008, and a 2018 report noted that represented “between fifteen and thirty-five percent of the national population”. 80% of these settlements are on government-owned lands.
Without title, residents “cannot use land as collateral for loans, stifling entrepreneurship and wealth creation."
Prime Minister Holness himself has recently described expanding land ownership and titling for informal settlements as critical to breaking intergenerational poverty.
Historians link this directly to the plantation past: “The uneven distribution has been maintained post-Emancipation, with plantations limiting peasant access to arable lands”.
By 1970, “71% of the farming population controls a mere 12% of the land” while “52% of the prime lands were owned by 0.7% of the population”.
The question Michael Manley posed in the 70s, “how to connect the descendants of enslaved people to the soil of the island," has not been answered to this day.
Roughly 30% of private land in Jamaica is still held as “family land,” passed down informally without wills, creating legal complications.
The government is now attempting to pursue systemic registration and bills to address “insecurity of tenure arising from a large number of persons occupying lands whose names are not on the titles."
Beach access is the most visible symbol of a deep problem. Jamaicans continue to complain about “the payment of fees for access to the foreshore” and “the loss of physical and visual access to the sea”.
Let us call it “the continued displacement and dispossession of the Jamaican people from the coastline."
A nation cannot be free if its people are locked out of its land and its sea. Until legislation establishes an irrevocable public right to beach access, and until land reform converts occupancy into title for the estimated 800,000+ Jamaicans living in informal settlements, Emancipation and Independence will remain dates on a calendar rather than lived realities.
The shoreline should not be a reminder of bondage. It should be proof that freedom finally includes the ground beneath our feet.
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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