Golding Ties Melissa Recovery Failures to a Land Titling Gap

Opposition Leader Mark Golding used the Peoples National Partys 88th annual conference, held for the first time outside Kingston, in Savanna-la-Mar, to lay out a five-point strategy for recovery in western Jamaica nearly eleven months after Hurricane Melissa. Land titling sat at the centre of it. Families cannot rebuild securely without the peace of mind of owning the land where their home is built, he told supporters.

Goldings plan called for a special land-titling programme for disaster-affected communities, alongside a publicly accessible reconstruction dashboard tracking spending in real time, dedicated financial support for farmers and small businesses, faster settlement of insurance claims, and climate-resilient rebuilding standards. He argued reconstruction priorities should be set with direct input from community organisations, churches, farmers and business operators, rather than decided exclusively in Kingston.

The choice of venue was itself part of the argument. Staging the partys national conference in the west, rather than the capital, was intended, the PNP said, to demonstrate solidarity with communities still working through recovery nearly a year after the storm. Golding leaned on findings from the auditor generals May 2026 report showing the government had spent only a fraction of the roughly $1.44 billion in hurricane relief donations it had received, using the figure to argue that both government capacity and donated funds were failing to reach people fast enough.

Land titling in particular is not a new problem Melissa created. An estimated fifth of Jamaicans already live on land they do not formally own, in some cases across four generations, well before the hurricane made rebuilding on insecure land tenure an urgent, immediate obstacle rather than a slow-burning one. Whether Goldings specific proposal for disaster-community titling gains traction, the underlying case, that secure title is a precondition for rebuilding, not a bureaucratic afterthought, is one that has bipartisan sympathy even where the political framing differs.