The plots are on council land on the eastern half of the island, marked, numbered and recorded in a register that has been kept since 1994.
A lease is five years at two hundred rufiyaa a year, renewable, and is granted to a household on the island register. A household may hold two plots. A lease requires the plot to be worked: a plot that has grown nothing for two full seasons goes back into the pool, and this has happened eleven times, each one decided at an open meeting with the holder invited rather than by a letter.
The rotation is the part that matters most and the part the council is most careful about. Twenty of the ninety three are rested each year, and which twenty is proposed by the growers themselves at the meeting before the planting season, not by the office. The council's job is to keep the record of what was rested when, so that the same plots are not rested twice while somebody else's is never rested at all. Eleven plots have never been rested since the register began and the council raises that every year.
What the council cannot do: decide who owns any land on this island, turn a plot lease into ownership, or write anything that implies either. A lease is a lease of council land for five years and the paper says exactly that. Ownership questions belong to the office that holds that authority and we will forward and chase.
Come to the office to read the register. It is the only complete record of who has worked what on this island for thirty years.