Land Is Not Scallion and Thyme. The Case for Treating It That Way.

Kingston, Jamaica, 8 May 2026. The Jamaican proverb holds that land is not scallion and thyme. It is not something that grows back in season. The wisdom embedded in that saying is older than most of the statutes that now govern land ownership in Jamaica, and it is more durable. What the proverb understands, and what the legal system struggles to deliver, is that land held informally, passed down through verbal agreement, or left untitled across generations is not really held at all. It is merely occupied, until someone challenges the occupation or the system demands proof of ownership that informal possession cannot provide.

Jamaica has too many lands and too few titles. The disproportion is not small. By the government’s own estimates, roughly 400,000 parcels of land across the island remain outside the formal title system. These are not empty plots with no connection to any household. They are family yards, hillside lots, coastal strips, and inherited portions of larger estates that have been occupied and passed down for decades or generations through informal arrangements that the law does not recognise as sufficient proof of ownership. The families who live on this land know it is theirs. The law does not know that, and the law’s ignorance costs them every time they need to borrow, sell, develop, or defend what they believe they hold.

The attorney’s observation that delay in regularising land ownership is itself costly cuts against a common assumption: that the titling process is something that can be deferred until it becomes necessary. In practice, the necessity has a habit of arriving at the worst possible moment. A matriarch dies without a will. A family member returns from abroad wanting to sell their share. A bank calls in a mortgage on land that turns out to have an unresolved title question. A squatter occupies a corner of an inheritance that nobody was monitoring. In every one of those situations, the absence of formal title transforms what might have been a straightforward transaction into a legal proceeding, with costs and timelines that are entirely avoidable if the work is done when there is no immediate crisis driving it.

The emotional and relational dimension of untitled family land is often underestimated in legal and policy discussions. A family that held land informally for generations has built its identity, its housing, and its economic security around that land. When the question of formal title arises, usually because someone wants to sell, develop, or borrow against it, it almost always surfaces competing claims and latent disputes that the informal system had simply never resolved. Children who assumed they would inherit receive no legal protection for that assumption. Siblings who moved away find they have no legal standing to assert an interest they were always told they held. The family meeting that everyone hoped would settle the matter produces arguments that a court will eventually have to resolve instead.

The attorney’s advice about family land is the most practically useful part of what legal professionals have been saying on this subject for years: open the conversation now, while the principals are alive and able to express their intentions, and convert informal understanding into formal documentation. A deed, a will, a registered transfer, or a formal partition of shared land is worth infinitely more than a verbal agreement, however sincere, when the moment comes to prove ownership in circumstances where the other party disputes it. Family land that is legally clear and formally divided may feel less romantically whole than the shared inheritance it once was. It is also exponentially more useful to the people who inherit it.

The government’s investment in land titling infrastructure, the e-Titles platform, the Korea partnership, and the National Land Agency’s surveying programme, is building the capacity to process informal tenure at scale. But that capacity serves no one who does not use it. The invitation to regularise is standing. The cost of not accepting it tends to arrive when the family can least afford it, compounded by legal fees, delayed transactions, and disputes that a timely decision years earlier would have prevented. Land is not scallion and thyme. The opportunity to protect it properly will not replant itself.