Do We Really Need Land Registration in the Marshalls?

Hezel, Francis X. (2004-09-28). [www.micsem.org Do We Really Need Land Registration in the Marshalls?]. Micronesian Counselor (Report). Kolonia, Pohnpei: Micronesian Seminar. pp. 1–8.

• Has attachment: File:AJ8W5KEI.pdf

Abstract: "Whenever I ran into people I knew as I was scooting around Majuro working on this project, they would invariably ask me what brought me to the island. When I’d say that I was in the Marshalls as part of a team attempting to help the Marshall Islands Government establish a system for land registration, they’d lower their eyes and softly shake their heads as if they were offering me sympathy on the loss of a family member or a diagnosis of terminal cancer. “How unfortunate!” their body language would say. They seemed to suggest that they would sooner be assigned to guard duty at the US Embassy in Iraq than have my job. Usually they would just sigh as they murmured something like “Land is such a sensitive issue here in the Marshalls.” Unspoken was the corollary: “You must either be insane or desperately broke to be messing around with land.

Land is indeed sensitive in the Marshalls, as it is throughout the Pacific. There is not much of it–only 70 square miles in the Marshalls–so it is highly valued. To have title to land once meant that a family could provide for all its basic needs: food, housing, transportation and medicine. But the supreme importance of land far transcends its value as a scarce resource. Land was the symbol of family unity and an identity marker for its individual members. The enormous importance accorded to land is epitomized and explained by the island saying: “People come and go, but the land and the name of the land stays and never changes.” In the past, contention over land was the leading cause of war; the only other motive that ranked close was women. Although wars have gone out of fashion in the Marshalls, land rights are every bit as emotion- laden and hotly contested as ever. Not a few families today are divided by land disputes..."