Roy L. Prosterman, a lawyer who left a profitable company legislation follow to champion land reform within the underdeveloped world, died on Feb. 27 at his house in Seattle. He was 89.
His dying was introduced by the Seattle land-rights institute Landesa, of which he was a founder. The group didn’t specify a trigger.
Mr. Prosterman labored with governments in some 60 nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America over almost six a long time, crafting plans to offer a level of possession to peasant households. Typically the governments he labored with obtained land by expropriating giant tracts, with compensation to the homeowners. At different instances, the federal government merely gave away land it owned.
Seeing land rights as the important thing to lifting up the world’s thousands and thousands of rural poor individuals, he pushed authoritarian governments in locations like Vietnam and El Salvador, in addition to rising democratic ones in nations like India, to distribute farmland to impoverished farmers.
In an obituary, Landesa said that thousands and thousands of individuals had benefited from the applications created by Mr. Prosterman and his group. Landesa, which was based in 1981 because the Rural Growth Institute on the College of Washington and have become an unbiased group in 1992, was “an early, and sometimes lonely, voice recognizing the significance that entry to land and safety of land has in uplifting the lives of the poor in agrarian economies,” the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote within the preface to “One Billion Rising: Regulation, Land and the Alleviation of International Poverty” (2009), a guide edited and partly written by Mr. Prosterman.
For Mr. Prosterman, the son of a Russian immigrant, the epiphany got here early in his profession. As a younger Harvard Regulation Faculty graduate, he landed a job at probably the most prestigious of New York’s white-shoe legislation corporations, Sullivan & Cromwell. In 1963 the agency despatched him to the impoverished West African nation of Liberia for a consumer trying to construct a big port there.
“The quarters that he and his colleagues within the company legislation agency have been staying in have been fairly luxurious,” the agricultural improvement skilled Tim Hanstad, his associate and co-founder of Landesa, recalled in an interview.
“They have been consuming imported caviar and salmon from Norway,” Mr. Hanstad mentioned, whereas the waterfront slums of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, are among the many most determined in West Africa: muddy, crowded, with little entry to sanitation or working water.
“It was a really sobering expertise discovering how badly many individuals on the planet reside,” he as soon as said. The situations, he mentioned, have been “past the purpose of poverty that may describe a lot of the world’s poor.”
Dissatisfied, he left the legislation agency in 1965 to show property, antitrust and worldwide funding legislation on the College of Washington, already consumed by the concept of utilizing his coaching to help the world’s rural poor. “He was trying to reside a lifetime of goal, of higher goal,” Mr. Hanstad mentioned.
A scholar pointed him to a law-review article suggesting uncompensated expropriation as a device for land redistribution in Latin America; Mr. Prosterman surmised that “when you tried to unravel it that method you’d possible find yourself with civil conflict as a substitute of land reform,” he told The New York Times in 2012.
In 1966 he wrote a counterproposal in Washington Regulation Evaluate titled “Land Reform in Latin America: Learn how to Have a Revolution And not using a Revolution.” He insisted that “the view that land reform must be carried out with less-than-full compensation of the landlords have to be discarded.”
The U.S. Company for Worldwide Growth seen and despatched him to South Vietnam in the course of the Vietnam Warfare as a part of the try and woo peasants away from the surging Vietcong. Mr. Prosterman got here up with a “land to the tiller” legislation, pushed by President Nguyen Van Thieu by means of Vietnam’s Nationwide Meeting, which in 1970 gave possession to tons of of 1000’s of tenant farmers in return for a “first rate value,” Mr. Prosterman recalled within the 2012 interview. He would typically observe that on account of the legislation, rice manufacturing surged and rural recruitment by the Vietcong plummeted.
Mr. Prosterman was widely known for the Vietnam land legislation, which a New York Times editorial referred to as “in all probability essentially the most bold and progressive non-Communist land reform of the twentieth century.” It grew to become his calling card. However it was not sufficient to avoid wasting the Thieu authorities.
For Mr. Prosterman, the accomplishment led to assignments in El Salvador and elsewhere. Largely, he didn’t expound world-transforming visions. Land reform, he mentioned within the 2012 interview, “merely places a given inhabitants — current or future — right into a relationship with that land base that’s best and equitable.”
The outcomes in El Salvador have been combined, as that they had been in Vietnam; once more Mr. Prosterman was referred to as in by the Company for Worldwide Growth, in 1980, within the midst of a civil conflict between leftist guerrillas and a right-wing authorities supported by the USA. Mr. Prosterman noted in a New York Occasions visitor essay in February 1981 that each left and proper hated the land challenge he had helped with. Nonetheless, he wrote optimistically, “40 p.c of all cropland has been transferred to greater than 210,000 peasant households.”
However in Might of the subsequent 12 months, the New York Occasions correspondent Raymond Bonner wrote, “In lower than one month as a legislative physique, El Salvador’s Constituent Meeting has blocked a lot of the nation’s land redistribution effort from being carried out.” As we speak, Landesa’s web site merely notes that El Salvador’s land reforms “had some restricted successes at addressing inequality.”
In newer a long time Mr. Prosterman centered a lot of his effort on India, which he mentioned in 2012 had “the very best focus of poor individuals on the planet.” He pushed what he referred to as “new era” concepts, through which India’s state governments would give “microplots,” a tenth of an acre or much less, to landless individuals, with “ladies’s names collectively on the title as homeowners.”
In one of many final issues he wrote, in 2009, Mr. Prosterman acknowledged that “little scope stays for conventional land-to-the-tiller applications that use expropriatory strategies to acquire non-public land” to offer farms to tenant farmers. This was, paradoxically, largely due to the decline of “authoritarian” governments, whose existence had made large-scale expropriation simpler.
“When the ability distances are so nice” between landlord and tenant, “democracies don’t work nicely,” Mr. Hanstad defined.
Roy L. Prosterman (the “L” didn’t stand for something) was born on July 13, 1935, in Chicago, the one baby of Sidney Prosterman and Natalie (Weisberg) Prosterman. His father was a businessman. He graduated from South Shore Excessive Faculty at 16 and from the College of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts at 18 in 1954. He obtained his legislation diploma in 1958.
Mr. Prosterman and his worldwide companions or the group he based obtained various awards, together with the Gleitsman Basis Worldwide Activist Award for assuaging inequality in 2003, the Schwab Basis Excellent Social Entrepreneur award in 2002, and the College of Chicago Public Service Award in 2010.
No fast relations survive.
Throughout his profession, Mr. Prosterman was cautious to downplay the political ramifications, versus the human ones, of his work.
“The actual fact of giving individuals safe rights to not less than some small sliver of the earth’s floor,” he mentioned in 2012, “strongly motivates them to make enhancements that enhance manufacturing and permit the household to make various basic-needs investments.”
