Roy L. Prosterman, a lawyer who left a profitable company legislation observe to champion land reform within the underdeveloped world, died on Feb. 27 at his dwelling in Seattle. He was 89.
His demise 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 many years, crafting plans to present a level of possession to peasant households. Typically the governments he labored with obtained land by expropriating massive tracts, with compensation to the house owners. At different occasions, the federal government merely gave away land it owned.
Seeing land rights as the important thing to lifting up the world’s tens of millions of rural poor folks, 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 stated that tens of millions 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 impartial group in 1992, was “an early, and infrequently 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 World Poverty” (2009), a e book 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 College graduate, he landed a job at one of the crucial prestigious of New York’s white-shoe legislation companies, Sullivan & Cromwell. In 1963 the agency despatched him to the impoverished West African nation of Liberia for a consumer seeking 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 knowledgeable Tim Hanstad, his accomplice and co-founder of Landesa, recalled in an interview.
“They have been consuming imported caviar and salmon from Norway,” Mr. Hanstad stated, 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 stay,” he stated in a speech at Claremont McKenna School in 2006, when he acquired the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Nonprofit Management. The situations, he stated, have been “past the purpose of poverty that may describe many 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 thought of utilizing his coaching to assist the world’s rural poor. “He was seeking to stay a lifetime of goal, of higher goal,” Mr. Hanstad stated.
A pupil pointed him to a law-review article suggesting uncompensated expropriation as a software for land redistribution in Latin America; Mr. Prosterman surmised that “if you happen to tried to resolve it that method you’ll possible find yourself with civil conflict as an alternative of land reform,” he advised The New York Instances in 2012.
In 1966 he wrote a counterproposal in Washington Regulation Evaluation titled “Land Reform in Latin America: How one can Have a Revolution With out a Revolution.” He insisted that “the view that land reform ought to be carried out with less-than-full compensation of the landlords should be discarded.”
The U.S. Company for Worldwide Growth observed and despatched him to South Vietnam in the midst of the Vietnam Warfare as a part of the try to 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 way of Vietnam’s Nationwide Meeting, which in 1970 gave possession to lots of of hundreds of tenant farmers in return for a “respectable worth,” Mr. Prosterman recalled within the 2012 interview. He would usually observe that because of the legislation, rice manufacturing surged and rural recruitment by the Vietcong plummeted.
Mr. Prosterman was well known for the Vietnam land legislation, which a New York Instances editorial referred to as “most likely probably the most formidable and progressive non-Communist land reform of the twentieth century.” It turned his calling card. But it surely was not sufficient to save lots of 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 stated within the 2012 interview, “merely places a given inhabitants — current or future — right into a relationship with that land base that’s most efficient 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 famous in a New York Instances visitor essay in February 1981 that each left and proper hated the land challenge he had helped with. Nonetheless, he wrote optimistically, “40 % of all cropland has been transferred to greater than 210,000 peasant households.”
However in Might of the following 12 months, the New York Instances correspondent Raymond Bonner wrote, “In lower than one month as a legislative physique, El Salvador’s Constituent Meeting has blocked many of the nation’s land redistribution effort from being carried out.” Right this moment, Landesa’s web site merely notes that El Salvador’s land reforms “had some restricted successes at addressing inequality.”
In newer many years Mr. Prosterman centered a lot of his effort on India, which he stated in 2012 had “the very best focus of poor folks on the planet.” He pushed what he referred to as “new era” concepts, by which India’s state governments would give “microplots,” a tenth of an acre or much less, to landless folks, with “ladies’s names collectively on the title as house owners.”
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 personal land” to present 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 facility 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 College at 16 and from the College of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts at 18 in 1954. He acquired his legislation diploma in 1958.
Mr. Prosterman and his worldwide companions or the group he based acquired a variety of 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 rapid members of the family 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 folks safe rights to at the very least some small sliver of the earth’s floor,” he stated in 2012, “strongly motivates them to make enhancements that improve manufacturing and permit the household to make a variety of basic-needs investments.”