One Fat Sheep a Year

Hurricane Irma crossed Barbuda in the small hours of 6 September 2017 as a category five storm, and it took roughly ninety-five per cent of the island's buildings with it. A two-year-old child was killed. With a second hurricane, Jose, forecast to follow within days, the government moved the entire population — something over 1,600 people — the forty kilometres south to Antigua. For the first time in about three hundred years, Barbuda had nobody living on it.

What happened next was not really about roofs. In December 2017, with most Barbudans still displaced and living in shelters and spare rooms in Antigua, parliament amended the law that governed who owned the island. The change was short and it was fundamental: the land that had been held in common by all Barbudans could now be bought as private freehold. The rebuilding argument, which everyone expected, became a property argument, which nobody outside the island had been following.

One fat sheep a year

The oddity goes back to 1685, when the Crown leased Barbuda to Christopher and John Codrington for a rent that has been quoted ever since as one fat sheep annually, if demanded. The Codringtons already held Betty's Hope on Antigua, and Barbuda was not acquired to be a plantation in its own right — it could not be one. The limestone is thin, there is no surface water, and the island is flat and dry enough that its highest point is thirty-eight metres. It was instead a provisioning estate: livestock, timber, provisions and enslaved labour for the sugar works across the water.

That accident of geology is why Barbuda never got the thing every other sugar island got — a map of estates, surveyed, fenced and inherited. When slavery was abolished in the British Caribbean in 1834, the people of Barbuda did not become tenants on somebody's cane fields, because there were none. They stayed, and they used the island as they had been using it: grazing, hunting, cutting timber, farming plots and moving them, with no individual titles because no individual titles had ever been issued. The Codrington lease ran out in 1870. The practice did not.

Common ownership on Barbuda was never a philosophy anyone chose. It is the residue of an island too poor to be worth carving up, and the people who inherited it have spent a century and a half defending an accident as a right.

Writing the custom down

By the twentieth century the arrangement was custom rather than law, which is a weak position to hold against a national government and an offshore investor. The Barbuda Local Government Act of 1976 created an elected Barbuda Council with real say over the island's land. Then the Barbuda Land Act of 2007 stated the thing outright: all land in Barbuda is owned in common by the people of Barbuda. Leases could be granted, but a lease for a major development required the approval of a majority of Barbudans voting at a public village meeting. In effect, a village of a few hundred adults held a veto over any hotel, marina or golf course proposed for a hundred-and-sixty-square-kilometre island.

December 2017

The government's case for the 2017 amendment was economic and not absurd. Land you do not own outright cannot be mortgaged, so a Barbudan cannot borrow against a house; and a lease that a village meeting can refuse is not, from a developer's point of view, a bankable asset. Freehold title was offered for a nominal sum — a single East Caribbean dollar — and presented as giving Barbudans, at last, something to their name. The Barbudan objection was about timing and about arithmetic. The vote was taken while the island was empty and its people scattered; and in a place where 1,600 people had held everything jointly, converting the commons into individual plots meant that most of the island would be left over, and that what was left over would be at the disposal of whoever administered it.

The airport and the Privy Council

The test case was not a hotel but a runway. In 2018 work started on a new airport for Barbuda, cut through terrain adjoining the Codrington Lagoon — a Ramsar wetland holding one of the largest magnificent frigatebird colonies in the world — without a completed environmental impact assessment. John Mussington, a school principal and marine biologist, and Jacklyn Frank brought judicial review. The Antiguan courts threw it out on standing: two residents, they held, had no sufficient interest to challenge the decision. On 5 February 2024 the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London — still the country's final court of appeal, after a 2018 referendum in which voters declined to move to the Caribbean Court of Justice — disagreed, ruled that they did have standing, and sent the matter back. The runway had been built years earlier. The point of the judgment was that Barbudans were entitled to ask.

What is actually being decided

It would be easy to write this as an island resisting development, and Barbudans mostly do not. The island lost its buildings, its school roof and much of its working-age population in a night, and the money to fix that has to come from somewhere; there are Barbudans working at the developments on the southern peninsulas, Palmetto Point and Coco Point, who would rather have the job than the principle. But the argument being had is about who signs. A commons is a slow, awkward, argumentative way to hold land, and it is also the only mechanism by which 1,600 people can say no to a buyer with more money than their entire national budget. Take it away and they still own the beach, individually, one plot at a time, which is a different thing entirely. Go and look at the sand spit outside Codrington Lagoon, where Irma cut a channel straight through the barrier and the sea now comes in where it did not before. The island is smaller and lower and more exposed than it was, the frigatebirds came back anyway, and the case about the runway is still, technically, live. Nobody has demanded the sheep in a long time.