Editorial | Land titling will unleash wealth

Nearly two decades ago, the Peruvian economist, Hernando De Soto, turned the world on to the fact that the poor in the world's poor countries weren't necessarily poor. At least not in the way they are generally portrayed. The greater poverty they faced was the means to unlock their wealth, often in land.

"By our calculations," Mr De Soto wrote in his seminal book, The Mystery of Capital, "the total value of real estate held, but not legally owned by the poor of the Third World and former communist nations is at least US$9.3 trillion."

In this respect, the critical difference between developed and developing countries was not only their technology gap, "but the world of legally enforceable transactions on property rights".

Jamaica was not among the examples cited in that 2000 book among the countries with the problem, but it could have been. That is why this newspaper is heartened by the pledges of both Prime Minister Andrew Holness and Opposition Leader Peter Phillips to deal decisively with the land tenure issue, although in Dr Phillips' case, this is if, or when, his People's National Party (PNP) returns to government. For Mr Holness, it should happen within three years.

Given Jamaica's slave and colonial history, land, or the ownership of it, is not only an economic issue, but often an emotive social issue, with which the country's governments have grappled, with limited success, for decades.

Indeed, as Dr Phillips again highlighted during his intervention in the Budget Debate, and estimated 700,000 Jamaicans - government minister Horace Chang once put the figure at 900,000 - live in squatter settlements. Further, 60 per cent of the country's small farmers, who are the core of the agricultural sector, have no titles to the land they work.

Untitled Land

Indeed, tens of thousands of parcels of land in Jamaica are untitled, in large part because the process is either too expensive, or complex, for the poor, and in spite of the many initiatives employed by administrations, including the existing Land Administration Management Programme (LAMP), which was launched the same year De Soto published The Mystery of Capital. Mr Holness now says that the Government will merge LAMP with the National Land Agency (NLA) under an incisive push to deal with the problem, which should lead to 20,000 parcels of land being registered and titled by 2021.

We applaud the PM's undertaking and hope the target is met and even surpassed. But Dr Phillips suggests that the problem demands more aggressive action, including an overhaul of existing land-registration laws. He claims that up to 2015, a decade and a half into the operation of LAMP, three-quarters of the applications through it for land titles had been "rejected because of technical issues relating to requests for subdivisions".

So a government he leads would separate the issue of land titling from subdivision approvals, as well as pass "new overarching land-titling legislation", bringing into a single act all the matters that now impact the subject.

Significantly, both sides are committed to using National Housing Trust (NHT) money to finance titling projects, and with regard to Dr Phillips' plan, a wider assault on squatter/informal settlements. This, in either case, will be money well spent, both as social engineering and as economic stimulus. For holding land titles will not only help bring more people into the formal economy, but potentially awaken dormant capital and unleash a new wave of investment.