1st Ibero-American Congress of Property Registration:
Land, Economic Development and New Technologies
Lima, November 3-6, 2003

The organisers of the 1st Ibero-America Congress of Property Registration invited FIG to send a representative to this conference that was arranged in Lima, Peru, November 3-6, 2003. FIG representative and one of the invited speakers was Vice President Bettina Petzold.

The conference was held at the Marriott Hotel in Miraflores, the most rich and the most beautiful quarter of Lima. The total area of Peru is about 1,3 million square kilometres and about half of its 27 million inhabitants live in poverty. What this means could be seen when leaving the hotel during the lunch break or in the evening. Lima is situated at the west coast of Peru, and since the passing Humboldt stream is very cold, it is always foggy except during summer, and therefore the sun can never be seen clearly. The air was very dirty as the whole city, partly because it never rains in Lima.

Government Palace, Lima

The congress hotel: Marriott Lima

The congress started in the evening of Monday, November 3rd, with the official opening ceremony, in which as well as during all sessions of the conference simultaneous translation was provided.

About 350 participants from 26 different countries attended the congress. Most of them were lawyers, geographers and cartographers. Since it is no surveying education programmes in Peru, the surveyors that attended came from foreign countries, mostly from developed countries.

There were plenary sessions in the morning and, beside Tuesday, in the late afternoon, in between parallel sessions in three different breakout rooms. Each session was from 1,5 to two hours; the speakers where asked to talk not longer than 45 minutes (plenary sessions) or 30 minutes (parallel sessions), and this was taken seriously. The rest of the time was foreseen for the statements of two panellists (10 minutes each), the answer / comments of the speaker and finally questions. The statements of the panellists were not always linked to the presentation, which led to some "second presentations". In addition, there was no further thematic subdivision of the presentations, so some presentations were very general and superficial, and some of the presentations had more or less the same content. It can be stated that the representatives of the developed countries provided more or less the same recommendation concerning registers and their connection to the cadastre. The most interesting presentation was given by John Mc Laughlin, University of New Brunswick, with the topic "Technology applied to Cadastre: Worldwide Trends in the New Millennium".

The chair of the organising committee was Mr. Carlos Gamarra, the Head of SUNARP (Superintendencia Nacional de los Registros Publicos), which was the organisation behind the congress. Mr. Gamarra appreciated very much that FIG was able to participate in the congress and he hoped that connections will be closer in the future.

Ms. Petzold gave a presentation “New Trends in the Handling of Land Use and Property" at the congress. The main content of the paper was based on “Cadastre 2014” and related recommendations from Paul van der Molen and Stig Enemark. With the help of Erwin Heine the PPT-slides where in English and Spanish, which made it much easier for the participants to follow this session.

The closing ceremony on Thursday, November 6th included the signing of an inter-institutional cooperation agreement, allowing some Peruvians to go to Spain for an real estate related education. The ceremony was followed by the closing cocktail in a very nice house in Colonial style of the Banco de Crédito del Perú.

Ms Petzold points out as her comment that it is very important to build up an institute of surveying at the Lima (or any other) University. That can only be done with external help, but obviously there are enough people that have the same interest in Peru.

Bettina Petzold