THE United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is to bring in experts from Washington DC to evaluate Jamaica's Land Administration and Management Programme (LAMP), even as it seeks to help the country sort out land tenure issues.

"Registering property has been a vexing issue here in Jamaica and has been a vexing issue for a long time and there have been other donors that have attempted to sort out the land titling process here and had only limited success. We want very much to try to help people get their properties formalised," Mission Director of the USAID Dr Karen Hilliard told the Observer recently.

The USAID mission director said part of this effort would be advocating for a cutback in the relevant fees.

"I think part of that is going to be reducing the fees for transferring property so that people don't avoid it.

If you make it easier and less costly then more people will do it and again if you lower the fee you are going to garner more revenue because more people will pay a smaller fee. We need to streamline that," she said.

Hilliard said the LAMP programme, which started in 2000, was one initiative the USAID had an eye on but said there were concerns that had to be addressed first.

"LAMP is the type of programme we are looking to engage in but we are also aware that that programme has been implemented in fits and starts.

It didn't have the kind of uptake by people wanting to title their lands and there were obviously some constraints that needed more analysis," she noted.

"If and when we engage and I say when, because we have decided we are going to engage, we have experts back in Washington who have tackled this around the globe.

We are going to bring them to Jamaica to do a thorough analysis of what went right in the LAMP programme and what went wrong before wading in on that one," she said.

Hilliard said she was well aware that factors such as the "informality of land holdings where persons have lands that have been passed down through their family but are without formal titles and the touchy issue of squatter settlements" have attributed to the situation.

LAMP, which is jointly funded by the Government of Jamaica and the Inter-American Development Bank, serves to boost Government's efforts to develop a land market and has four components namely land registration, public land management, land information management and land use planning and development.

Agriculture Minister Dr Christopher Tufton in 2007 expressed dissatisfaction with the pace of land titling in Jamaica and pledged to implement measures to expedite the process.

Addressing the matter further, the minister said that while LAMP was not a total failure, it should have been quite clear from year one or year two that there was a challenge in terms of meeting the targets.

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