Jamaica’s Churches Have Lost Hundreds of Acres to Squatters. They Are Not Alone.

Kingston, Jamaica, 1 November 2018. If squatting and adverse possession were problems that affected only inattentive private landowners who had migrated abroad or neglected their plots, they might remain primarily a matter of private legal consequence. The revelation that several major Jamaican church denominations, including the Moravian, Baptist, Methodist, Anglican, and Roman Catholic churches, have lost hundreds or thousands of acres of land to squatters over the preceding decades changes the character of the problem. These are institutions with legal teams, with property management functions, and with institutional memory that spans generations. If they can lose land to adverse possession at scale, the scope of the vulnerability facing ordinary Jamaican landowners is considerably wider than the public debate typically acknowledges.

The most documented case at the time the Gleaner first reported this in 2018 was the Moravian Church’s 500-acre estate in Lititz, St Elizabeth, of which squatters had captured 435 acres going back to the 1970s. That is 87 per cent of an estate that the church had held as a registered landowner. The mechanism, as the church’s property representative described it, was the standard one: persons occupying sections of the property over time, paying land taxes on the portions they occupied, and eventually being positioned to claim title through the combination of possession and tax payment. The church, focused on its spiritual mission and managing its affairs across a wide network, did not respond with the sustained legal vigilance the law demands.

What the institutional dimension of this story adds to the adverse possession conversation is a corrective to the idea that only absentee or careless individual owners are at risk. Churches, charities, and other institutions that hold rural or semi-rural land as part of a broader portfolio of property are, if anything, more vulnerable in certain respects than individual owners. Individual owners of a single parcel have a clear personal interest in that land that tends to keep it in their attention. An institution managing dozens or hundreds of properties across multiple parishes may simply fail to maintain the monitoring vigilance that the law requires for each parcel, not through negligence in any culpable sense but through the ordinary difficulty of managing a large and geographically dispersed portfolio.

The Baptist Union’s characterisation of the behaviour it was experiencing as reflecting a disregard for any framework of legal land ownership is a more measured version of the bar president’s later framing of adverse possession as stealing. Both observations point at the same reality: that there is a portion of squatting activity in Jamaica that is not driven by housing desperation or historical exclusion from land access, but by a calculated exploitation of the law’s indifference to the moral quality of an occupation, provided it meets the technical requirements of duration, openness, and exclusivity.

For Jamaica’s broader property market, the institutional land loss story carries two direct implications. The first is that any serious land reform programme needs to account for institutional landholders, not just individual ones. The e-Title alert system, the accelerated titling programme, and the other instruments of the current reform agenda are primarily designed around individual ownership transactions. Institutions that hold multiple parcels across multiple parishes need a portfolio-level approach to adverse possession monitoring that those instruments alone do not provide. The second implication is about the character of recoverable land. Hundreds of acres of rural land in parishes like St Elizabeth, if they could be recovered or at least formally stabilised in tenure, represent meaningful development and agricultural potential. Their current status, effectively occupied by communities with no formal legal standing but with entrenched physical presence, makes that potential very difficult to realise.

The courts have noted the moral discomfort of the outcomes they are required to produce when adverse possession law is applied rigorously. Two senior Jamaican judges have, in separate cases, observed that the legislature may wish to revisit the law’s operation, particularly in relation to registered land, and suggested the possibility of requiring adverse possessors to pay compensation to dispossessed owners as part of any title transfer. That suggestion has not yet produced legislation. But its source, the judiciary rather than advocacy groups, gives it a weight that arguments for reform from outside the courts do not always carry. The question now is whether the political will that has become visible in the parliamentary debate translates into statutory change before another generation of Jamaican landowners, institutional and individual alike, discovers how much land they have already lost.