Appendix B: Morne Panache pilot project field activities: Household survey, land tenure study, parcel demarcation, and claims process

B.1 Preparatory Work

At the outset of the Project the Government formed a Steering Committee, consisting of a number of officials from the Ministry of Agriculture (the Minister of State as Chairman, the Chief Agricultural Officer, the Assistant Permanent Secretary of Agriculture, the Superintendent of Lands and Surveys, and the Chief of the Forestry Division), a Project Community Liaison Officer, a Project Extension Officer, and the OAS Project Chief for Saint Lucia. To introduce the Project to people in the area, create an awareness of its objectives, and facilitate field work on the preparatory surveys and studies, the Steering Committee mounted an information campaign, consisting of news releases in local and foreign newspapers serving communities of Saint Lucians, frequent announcements on the radio in English and Patois, community meetings organized by the Project staff, and an open-day activity at which a descriptive brochure on the Project was distributed. The preparatory work included the household survey, a study of the socio-cultural aspects of land tenure, a land capability study, and a study of appropriate farm sizes.^{28 29}

28 L. Strachan, op. cit.

²⁹ D.G. Woodson, op. cit.

B.1.1 Household Survey

During September 1982, the Land Reform Unit of the Ministry of Agriculture carried out a household survey, covering every residence in the Project area. The survey gathered basic data on household units, land tenure, the use of labour and credit, and the residents' aspirations with respect to farming. The purpose of the survey was to develop a profile of the social and material circumstances in which small farming in the area took place and thus to signal potential problem areas confronting the process of land registration and farmer resettlement.

Directed to 300 heads of household, the survey consisted of 43 questions. Three members of the community (including the Project liaison officer), trained as interviewers, administered the survey. The interviews, usually conducted in Saint Lucia Creole (SLC) and recorded on the questionnaire schedules in English, took place either in the respondents' homes or in the Pilot Project field office. It took about two months to complete all the interviews and another two months to code and analyze the data.

The questionnaire elicited information on the age, gender, education, and occupation(s) of each respondent and on the size and composition of the households. The questionnaire recorded the size, location, and form of tenure for each plot in the respondents' landholdings. When a respondent reported that he or she held no agricultural land within the Project area, or owned no land at all, the interview was terminated. Thus, the entire questionnaire schedule was administered only to those 160 respondents holding some land within the Project area.

These 160 respondents were asked how they had acquired their land, whether they possessed legal documentation, whether they had sold land, and whether their land was in dispute. They were asked what types of farm labour they used, how many labourers they employed, and if they needed additional labourers; whether they had received agricultural credit in the past five years; what they hoped for in the way of additional farmland or the partitioning of family-land; and, finally, how they thought the Government might help to improve farming in the Project area.

In retrospect, one weakness of the survey was that it relied too heavily on respondents' ability to recall information. Data derived from responses at a particular point in time have inherent limitations that must be recognized if these data are to be interpreted without access to their historical context. Even so, the survey provided much useful information. The survey was highly instructive in the determination of how much land was necessary for successful resettlement and to what respondents could afford to pay for the lease or purchase of land.

Age. Gender. Education, and Occupation of Respondents

The age distribution of questionnaire respondents is shown in Table B-1.

The largest single group of respondents fell into the 60+ range and, excluding persons who did not know their age, 58.3 percent were 40 years of age and above.

The survey figures must be treated with caution because they refer, as was noted above, exclusively to heads of household rather than to all household members who might have been active farmers. Nevertheless, the data roughly confirm previous research that indicated that the age structure of the farming population was skewed toward the older groups.

Table B-1: Household Heads in Project Area by Age

The age distribution of the respondents may also be significant in relation to the importance they attributed to farming as an occupation and to the number of years they had been working in the area. A majority of respondents reported own-account farming as their primary occupation. 78.2 percent considered farming to be the most important of their occupations. Of the 160 respondents who farmed within the Project area, 30.1 percent reported having farmed for more than 30 years. Another 33.7 percent had farmed from 11 to 30 years.

It is common to hear that young Saint Lucians show a preference for non-agricultural occupations. Although the survey did not specifically determine the desires of young persons to acquire land, statements by informants during formal and informal interviews indicated that farming ranked low among younger males and females in the Project area. As one woman in her mid-40s explained, "Youth is the time to enjoy life," (SLC "Lajenes se le pou drive, pou joui lavi-ou.") and she specifically mentioned travel to foreign countries and non-agricultural employment in Castries as preferable alternatives. Thus, area residents may envision an ideal occupational cycle that includes farming only as one approaches middle age.

Of the 300 questionnaire respondents, 65 percent were male and 35 percent female. There appeared to be no significant differences between the sexes with regard to the importance they attached to farming as an occupation. However, the fact that more than a third of the household heads were female may be significant for the manner in which landholdings were cultivated. Although there appeared to be no formal distinctions between the sexes in regard to the inheritance of land or involvement in land-tenure relationships, it seems plausible to assume that the gender division of labour in agriculture and other aspects of gender-role differentiation influenced how female farmers managed their farms and the nature of their aspirations with regard to farming.

Only 18 respondents reported "housewife" as an occupation, and a mere 5 percent said this was their most important occupation. However, none of the survey categories were cross-tabulated for gender. It would be especially useful to have information on the distribution of legal and common-law marriages in the Project area, on the role expectations associated with different types of conjugal unions, and on the history of conjugal relationships. Such data would permit more well-founded generalizations on the implications of gender for landholding and land-use than are possible at present.

In the area of formal education, 65.3 percent of the respondents had attended primary school and 3 percent had attended secondary school. At the extremes, only one person had obtained post-secondary training, while 94 respondents, or 31.3 percent, had had no formal schooling whatsoever.

Household Size and Composition

Table B-2 shows the size and composition of the respondents' households by total size and by numbers of adults and children.

Table B-2: Household Size and Composition In Project Area

Households in the Project area averaged 5.01 persons. While the majority, at 64.7 percent, contained no more than two adults, 35 percent contained three or more adults, for an average of 2.5 adults per household. Eighty-four households, or 28 percent of the total, contained no children, and 50.4 percent had four or fewer; the average number of children per household with children was approximately three.

No further information was elicited on relations of kinship and authority within households, or on the allocation of household and farm responsibilities. It is therefore impossible to deduce if any association existed between household size and the demand for land or household size and the extent of the respondents' aspirations to remain in farming. Household composition may have been just as important as household size in this respect, as 65 percent of the respondents holding land within the Project area reported using family labour to farm their plots.

Characteristics of Landholdings

Perhaps the most striking feature of the responses to survey questions concerning land was that nearly half of all respondents did not hold land within the Project area, and 20 percent held no land at all. It is pertinent to recall here the 21 percent who did not claim own-account farming as their most important occupation.

The fact that so many respondents held no land within the Project area may also be significant in another sense. Because Morne Panache residents held only 918.7 acres of the 1,500 in the Project area, it may be concluded that some non-residents worked land there and that some farmers working elsewhere chose to live there for reasons not pursued by the survey.

As Table B-3 shows, the size of the landholdings of respondents with at least one plot in the Project area was fairly evenly distributed across the selected holding size categories. More than half of the respondents held less than five acres.

Table B-3: Morne Panache Residents' Landholdings In and Outside the Project Area

Another significant feature of the data was the small number of plots per holding: 80 percent of the 240 respondents holding agricultural land in or out of the Project area owned no more than two plots, and 47.4 percent owned only one. Similarly, as Table B-4 shows, 59.3 percent of the landholdings within the Project area consisted of one plot.

These data are consistent with macro-level analyses of landholding size in the small-farming sector. However, the survey data on disputes (discussed below), the respondents' complaints about inadequate marketing facilities, problems with the credit system, and poor secondary roads, all reinforce the notion that holding size per se is only one of several constraints on agricultural production from the small farmer's perspective. Thus, while 45.6 percent of the respondents who held land within the Project area reported that they wanted to acquire both the land they were currently occupying and additional land to expand their farming activities, none of these respondents singled out the size of landholdings in open-ended questions as a problem for which Government might find a solution.

The data also raise questions about the validity of small-farming models that emphasize the importance of multiple plots and dispersed holdings for patterns of intercropping, crop rotation, and the intensiveness of agricultural production. Detailed data on cropping, labour allocation, and other factors related to land use in the Project area would help to place the "plots per holding" data in proper perspective. Additional data would also permit a test of the hypothesis that farmers tend to invest more in their own land than in family-land.

Table B-4: Number and Size of Plots in Project Area Held by Respondents

Table B-6: Combinations of Tenure Forms

Of all owned or family-land parcels, 61.8 percent were held with some form of documentation (usually a deed of sale), but only 48.5 percent had been surveyed. In the cases of the 65 parcels for which no documents could be produced, about half of these respondents reported that someone else was holding. While the reliability of these responses was difficult to evaluate, the percentage of farmers holding documentation was somewhat higher than expected. Of all these parcels 35.8 percent had been purchased and 56.5 percent inherited, but 83.6 percent of the respondents had never sold land themselves. Further investigation of these responses may indicate important changes in the land market over time and how these changes influence the degree and rate of land fragmentation.

Among those who rented land, 59.4 percent did not have written contracts. Ten of these respondents were sharecroppers. More than a third of the renters plus all the sharecroppers were in precarious tenure situations. The fact that only one respondent had experienced difficulty with his landlord suggested that rental tenure is much more secure in practice.

Regarding agricultural credit, 20.6 percent had applied to a lending institution and all but four had received loans. Only one respondent reported having obtained credit from a non-institutional source.

Land Disputes

About a third of the 170 parcels that were owned individually, or as a portion of family-land, were subject to some kind of dispute. However, this figure is perhaps not as dramatic as some accounts of small landholdings and family-land would suggest.

The land disputes were characterized by respondents as having to do with title in 45.6 percent of the cases, with boundaries in 31.6 percent, and with both in 22.8 percent.

During the field work, however, it was discovered that the substance of the disputes was somewhat more complicated. Boundary or title disputes related both to separate and to family-landholdings. Thus, they could result from encroachment by one landowner on the holding of a neighbour, from family-land co-heirs who feel that one co-heir is using too much of the common holding, that a co-heir has monopolized the best land or that the boundaries of plots allocated to each co-heir within the holding have been breached. Ostensibly, similar disputes could involve neighbouring landowners who had lived harmoniously until some land-related or non-land-related matter caused friction.

Disputes could be longstanding. Two had persisted for twenty years, and some had apparently been "inherited" along with the land they concerned. Several respondents felt that land disputes in general, and family-land disputes in particular, had increased in their lifetimes. They attributed this development to the declining influence of traditional authority figures such as elders, to an increased awareness of ways to manipulate the legal system, and these in turn to higher levels of formal education among younger Project area residents. Unfortunately, the survey data on education were too schematic to prove or disprove this assessment.

B.1.2 Socio-cultural Aspects of Land Tenure

In speaking of the "land-tenure system" of an agrarian society there is a tendency to focus on formal legal rights to land that functions as an economic good in society. Accordingly, studies of such systems usually focus on the laws concerning the occupancy and use of land and on legal processes, especially the activities of lawyers, surveyors, notaries, and judges.

The legal features of land-tenure systems, including the methods of documenting ownership and the rules of legal succession, are used to formulate hypotheses about relationships between tenure and other features of the agro-economic structure. For example, the distribution of landholdings in terms of form of tenure size and quality, or tenure security in the form of legal documents, can be related to the type of agricultural production and to differing levels of farm income. Also, legally-sanctioned inheritance rules, such as primogeniture or joint succession, may be used in support of propositions regarding ways in which land tenure constrains or facilitates agricultural development.

Legal and economic analyses call attention to important dimensions of land-tenure systems, but they do not take into account the subtle and equally important social and cultural factors that influence how land is held and used. A certain formalistic bias towards legal codes and documents and reliance on macro-level statistical information often leads to disdain of verbal agreements and other informal arrangements that may characterize tenure relationships at the micro level.

As in other Caribbean societies, land functions in Saint Lucia not only as a legally defined economic good but also as a medium through which social relations between individuals and groups are expressed and sustained. This adds credence to presumptions regarding the complexity of Saint Lucian land tenure, which is a socio-cultural domain whose features are subject to customary symbolic valuation as well as formal legal definition. Thus, investigations of the tenure system must consider the cultural values and social practices of local communities that, together with legal and economic factors, determine patterns of landholding and land use. It is in this broader and more complex sense that land tenure is discussed here.

Five distinct forms of tenure describe land in the Project area: ownership, leasehold, sharecropping, permission, and squatting. The customary - as opposed to the legal - definitions of these include a wide range of circumstances and embrace a variety of informal arrangements that may distinguish tenure relations of the same tenure type. They connect individuals with plots of land (whose precise dimensions may be unknown) and involve them in a web of flexible interpersonal and social relationships that are distinctive in the management of limited material resources.

Ownership

Land may be owned individually (freehold) or jointly (family-land). The customary tenure definition permits land ownership without legal documents such as deeds of sale, titles, wills, or survey plans. While most respondents felt that the possession of legal documents legitimized ownership claims, and a substantial number possessed them, documents were not prerequisites for advancing claims or for recognition within the community. In the absence of legal documentation, the legitimacy of ownership claims is evaluated on the basis of public knowledge about the land and the reputed landowner. When evaluating ownership claims, community members refer to accounts of land transactions, the claimant's personal biography and work history, and his or her reputation and socioeconomic standing.

In freehold ownership an individual considers himself, and is considered by others, to hold exclusive rights of possession, use, and usufruct in a landholding. Freehold land may be inherited, purchased, or received as a grant, and the landowner (SLC "mette") may use and dispose of it as he or she sees fit.

In contrast, joint ownership limits the rights of the landowner. It is defined as a situation in which two or more people hold rights of possession, use, and usufruct collectively. According to informants, joint ownership occurred in the Project area only in the form of family-land.

Family-land (SLC "te fammiy") is created or perpetuated with intestate succession, and is the collective inheritance of possession, use, and usufruct rights by a group of persons who are related by blood. This group may contain only the deceased person's children but often includes a wider range of kin types - brother, sister, uncle aunt, cousin - as a result of previous instances of succession. In principle, all the deceased person's children inherit these rights and equal shares of all the land in question, and where the deceased is childless the inheritance passes to the other kin types.

The central features of joint ownership under family-land tenure are that all the co-heirs hold rights in equal shares and that no portion of the land may be permanently alienated by any of them without the agreement of the entire inheritance group. However, customary family-land tenure is more complex even in principle because there are further proscriptions on the exercise of rights and because the definition encompasses a variety of situations.

For example, not all theoretically appropriate kin types inherit land, nor are all members of those kin types that do inherit expected to exercise their rights. This may have to do with the size, location, and land-use history of the family-holding or the size of the inheritance group. The exercise of rights in family-land also appears to be influenced by the co-heirs' residence, by the priority accorded to the deceased person's proximate kin, and by assessments of the needs of the co-heirs for land in relation to the availability of other land or the possibility of non-agricultural employment. These aspects of the family-land definition support observations on the functions of the institution as a form of social and economic security.

Family-land is also considered an expression of kinship bonds between members of a localized group whose members maintain ties even though physically absent. However, they are expected to make use of these ties only in time of need.

Aside from inalienability, there is another important proscription on the exercise of joint ownership rights. Although co-heirs inherit possession rights and use in the entire family-landholding collectively, there is an individual allocation of rights of use and usufruct in specific portions of it. As opposed to the legal procedure of subdivision or partition, this allocation may take the form of "pre-inheritance plots" (land allocated to a potential co-heir for housing or cultivation before he has inherited it formally) or of an agreement among the co-heirs after the death of the person from whom the land is inherited.

Contrary to what several researchers have reported, this means that all co-heirs are entitled to equal shares of a family-landholding but do not hold equal rights of usufruct. Thus, informants reported that their co-heirs were entitled to reap annual and permanent crops planted by the person from whom the land was inherited, but that no co-heir had the right to reap any crop planted by another co-heir, either before or after inheritance, without permission. One of the main reasons some informants wanted the land partitioned was to stop actual disputes or avoid potential ones over conflicting rights of use and usufruct.³⁰ They considered this to be a form of theft that was not punishable by law because it involved family.

30 The opinions of survey respondents about the desirability of partition, which were equally divided, depended on whether or not their own family landholdings were in dispute. They did not associate partitioning with improved or expanded farming - many on both sides were interested in expanding their operations.

Even this cursory description indicates the complexity of rights in family-land. Three areas of disagreement among respondents make it still more difficult to define unambiguously the principles underlying this form of ownership.

Informants held varying opinions regarding the status of illegitimate children (SLC "yich deyo," "yich bata") at inheritance. Most held that "tout yich se yich" (all children are children), entitled to the same inheritance rights, regardless of legal status, but several felt that illegitimate children should be provided for separately or at least were only entitled, to a much smaller portion of the inheritance than the legitimate children would receive. Perhaps the most important point about this sort of disagreement among informants is the extent to which the resolution of such inheritance problems depends on the attitude a parent took towards the "outside" children before he or she died and on whether or not amicable social relations exist among the parties involved.

Informants also disagreed on how long it took for inherited land to qualify as family-land. Some maintained that the land must be transmitted through at least two generations, while others held that any land inherited from the generation of one's father or mother was family-land. Among other things, this definitional discrepancy complicated the interpretation of questionnaire responses about family-land and permission. Plots held by permission may be part of family-landholdings, and some of those reporting family-land may not have inherited it at the time of the survey.

Third, informants had different assessments of the status of purchased land (SLC "te eritye") at the time of succession. Several contended that only inherited land (land acquired through intestate succession in the previous generation) is subject to the proscriptions affecting rights in family-land. Others stated that unless provision for the disposition of land purchased by the deceased had been made orally or in a will, both types of land become family-land upon the owner's death.

Leasehold

Leasehold or rental (SLC "loue te") refers to a situation in which rights of use and usufruct in land are granted by one person to another in exchange for a fixed cash sum. Land may be leased by a landowner to a tenant or sublet by a tenant. Leases, which may take the form of oral agreements or written contracts, vary in length from one crop to several years and may be renewed or terminated by agreement of the parties. Should a landowner decide to terminate a rental agreement unilaterally, he is expected to give his tenant notice. Depending on the nature of the lease and the relationship between the parties, according to the informants, the period of notice may range from the growing season of a short-term crop to the full term of a longer lease.

In principle, rent is supposed to be paid before cultivation begins. However, arrangements for partial or delayed rent payments are often made. Rental agreements also specify which crops may be planted or harvested. In several cases, informants reported that their rental agreements permitted them to harvest coconuts or fruit as well as to cultivate the land. Others said they were allowed to plant fruit trees or bananas but had specifically agreed not to seek compensation for these trees when their leases ended.

Sharecropping

Sharecropping (SLC "dimotye") is defined as the exchange of use and usufruct rights in land against one-third of the crop harvested from it. Although the informants considered sharecropping to be a form of rental, the fact that the rent is paid in kind under most sharecropping arrangements led them to distinguish this form of tenure from leasehold.

In most cases only small amounts of land, usually cultivated with root crops, legumes, and other food, are sharecropped. However, a few informants knew of cases in which landowners had entered sharecropping arrangements to acquire labour to harvest fruit trees and coconuts.

It is noteworthy that the division of the harvest between the landowner and the sharecropper takes place while the crop is still in the ground. The standing crop is divided into three equal portions. The sharecropper has first choice, the landowner selects one from the remaining two, and the sharecropper gets the final portion. Informants maintained that this practice minimizes the possibility of disputes over the division of the crop and usually leaves the sharecropper with the best and worst parts of the harvest.

Permission

Permission (SLC "pemisyon") denotes situations in which a person who has access to land through one of the forms of tenure described above grants rights of use and usufruct to a second party usually a kinsman or friend, without expecting compensation. The land may range in area from a patch on the fringes of a plot to several acres, but is generally small and the permission is generally for short periods, often only long enough to harvest one crop. The person using the land often maintains the amicable nature of the relationship by giving token gifts of crops.

Squatting

Under both the customary and the legal definitions of tenure, squatting (SLC "twavay late en pa we") is the unauthorized occupation and use of land. But where as the legal definition stresses the abridgment of property rights in abstract terms, the customary definition focuses on a person's right to make a living within a particular context. Thus, informants felt that squatting should be judged in relation to the social identities of both the landowner and the squatter, their relative "need" for land, and the length of time the land has remained unused: squatting on long-unused estate or Government land was considered less offensive than squatting on temporarily fallow land belonging to a fellow community member and small farmer. This evaluation distinguishes between "outsiders," land-rich institutions or people who are not thought to share the values and fate of the local community, and "insiders" or peers who participate in a common way of life.

All the tenure types except sharecropping apply both to agricultural land (SLC "te agwikilti", "te bitasyon", "te jaden") and to house-land (SLC "te anplasman kay"). However, the distinction between the two has special relevance for family-land inheritance.

In principle, how the rights of co-heirs in agricultural and house-land are exercised depends upon factors such as the size of the holding and the area within it considered suitable for housing. Where a house is part of the inheritance, a specific heir is often designated orally or by will. According to informants, this usually will be the deceased person's last child or a daughter who has lived in the house and cared for the parent at the time of death. Support and care of this sort are considered by the other co-heirs to confer special rights where houses and, in some cases, agricultural land are concerned.

Respondents ranked the four forms of tenure in terms of the security they provided. Because security influences the types of crops planted and the amount of labour, capital, and time that a farmer will invest, respondents also ranked the tenure forms by the degree of farming autonomy they permitted. Freehold was considered to be the most secure and the one permitting the greatest autonomy, followed by rental, family-land, sharecropping, permission, and squatting. However, the informants were quick to point out that other factors such as the specific nature of a rental or sharecropping arrangement and whether or not the parties involved were on "good terms" (SLC "ve byen") also influenced their ideas about security and thus their farming decisions.

When questioned about the potential impact of land titling and registration on farming, the majority of informants said it was necessary and long overdue. They felt that it would impose order on what was often a chaotic and troublesome situation and perhaps even pave the way for the future development of the area. Nevertheless, they were also candid about its limitations. A one elderly gentleman put it: "bay tit evek wejiste te se youn bel bagay, men papye pa vann fig banann eben dasheen, e i pa chanje mes piyes mounn." ("To title and register land is a very good thing. But papers don't change the attitude and behaviour of people.") Whenever they discussed the Pilot Project, land was always coupled with other factors such as consumption needs, markets, roads, and the character of social relations in the community, which define the socio-cultural milieu in which land is held and used.

B.2 Land Demarcation and Claim Recording

The studies described above were not meant to be an end in themselves. Rather, the data gathered were to furnish policy guidelines that would assist a local community-level exercise in land registration and resettlement of farmers on a limited scale. Therefore, the next activity in the 1982-83 biennium was a land-demarcation exercise.

Before the demarcation started, about six weeks were spent in inventorying and mapping all houses in the area. Occupants identified in advance were served notices to clear their boundaries and to be present on the date for which demarcation was planned.

The community liaison officer ensured adequate communication on the Project's objectives and procedures, promoted cooperation, and helped to avoid problems in the interaction between the community and the Project.

B.2.1 Registration of Claim Forms

Every claimant of a parcel was invited to fill out a claim form (see Appendix 2) at the field office, with the assistance of the Project officer. A receipt was issued, and its number was registered by the demarcation team when the parcel was being surveyed, thus establishing a link between the identifying information on the claim form and the parcel characteristics collected during demarcation and surveying. Some claimants refused to fill out the form either because they did not hold any title or other documents and believed they had no basis to claim even though they were encouraged to do so, because they did not believe in the exercise, or because they already held a recent survey plan of their property and therefore regarded the exercise as superfluous; hence there were parcels that could not be related to a claim.

Section B.2.2.3 addresses the information collected from the 155 completed claim forms.

B.2.2 Field Performance

During the 28 weeks of demarcation activities, a total of 98 parcels were demarcated, covering 350 acres, in three contiguous sections. Table B-7 shows the statistics for each of the three sections. Performance, in terms of acres per week, was lowest in Section I. This was the first section to be demarcated and also the most difficult: it had the highest housing density, the smallest average parcel size (1.5 acres), was the area that had been occupied longest, and had a high incidence of boundary and title conflicts.

Table B-7: Field Performance of Demarcation Team

B.2.4 Some Implications of Land Demarcation

The Pilot Project demonstrated the various problems of land tenure in small farming societies, and tested a methodology for demarcation of parcels. The demarcation team surveyed 350 acres, or one-third of the small-farming area. During the course of the exercise the rate of surveying more than doubled: rising from less than 1.5 acres to nearly 4 acres per day. The following factors were later considered in the design and implementation of the national LRTP:

Surveying

1. The hilly terrain, prevalent in Saint Lucia, is cut through by numerous small ravines and difficult to survey. Average slopes ranged from 20 and 30 percent. Parcels were small and boundaries were not well kept.

2. Adjoining owners or occupants waited until the demarcation team entered the field before clearing their boundaries. Clearing thick underbrush is difficult and time-consuming. Farmers were not enthusiastic, especially when the work required cooperation with a neighbour. Those who were uncertain of the exact nature of their mutual boundaries did not wish to begin clearing until the demarcation team could direct them.

3. Boundary disputes needed to be settled in some fashion before demarcation could start. A number of disputes were never resolved: two lines were cut and surveyed, or no lines at all. In other cases, an agreement reached in the presence of the demarcation team was later revoked by one of the parties involved. The cases for which no action was taken needed to be reviewed during the adjudication process of the LRTP.

4. The demarcation team used basic prismatic compasses and chain. This may have been the most appropriate method considering the team's previous experience and training, but it was also the slowest. With the necessary training, demarcation teams could be more efficient using equipment such as EDM-optic theodolites. Given the special nature of the terrain in the Caribbean, it would be advisable to include the automatic reduction of slope-distances to horizontal-distances with this equipment.

The Claims Process

Many occupants or owners lacked accurate information on the location of the parcel being claimed. A majority of the claimants could not pinpoint their parcels on a 1:5000 map of the Project area. Instead, claimants made references to no-longer-existing estates and area names, or to the owner of adjacent parcels, some of which may have been aliases. Furthermore, a small number of participants claimed more than one parcel at the same time, all in the same general area.

It proved nearly impossible to identify a demarcated parcel based solely on the information given on the claim form. When a claimant was absent at the time of demarcation and did not otherwise send a representative or inform the team, the link between his or her claim and the demarcation information could not be established. 16 of the 98 demarcated parcels were claimed by more than one person.