Roy L. Prosterman, a attorney who left a profitable company regulation follow to champion land reform within the underdeveloped global, died on Feb. 27 at his house in Seattle. He used to be 89.
His demise used to be introduced by means of the Seattle land-rights institute Landesa, of which he used to be a founder. The group didn’t specify a reason.
Mr. Prosterman labored with governments in some 60 international locations in Asia, Africa and Latin The us over just about six a long time, crafting plans to provide a point of possession to peasant households. Once in a while the governments he labored with acquired land by means of expropriating vast tracts, with reimbursement 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 sector’s hundreds of thousands of rural deficient folks, he driven authoritarian governments in puts like Vietnam and El Salvador, in addition to rising democratic ones in international locations like India, to distribute farmland to impoverished farmers.
In an obituary, Landesa said that hundreds of thousands of folks had benefited from the techniques created by means of Mr. Prosterman and his team. Landesa, which used to be based in 1981 because the Rural Building Institute on the College of Washington and become an unbiased group in 1992, used to be “an early, and incessantly lonely, voice spotting the significance that get admission to to land and safety of land has in uplifting the lives of the deficient in agrarian economies,” the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote within the preface to “One Billion Emerging: Regulation, Land and the Alleviation of International Poverty” (2009), a e-book edited and in part written by means of Mr. Prosterman.
For Mr. Prosterman, the son of a Russian immigrant, the epiphany got here early in his occupation. As a tender Harvard Regulation Faculty graduate, he landed a task at probably the most prestigious of New York’s white-shoe regulation companies, Sullivan & Cromwell. In 1963 the company despatched him to the impoverished West African country of Liberia for a shopper taking a look to construct a big port there.
“The quarters that he and his colleagues within the company regulation company had been staying in had been fairly sumptuous,” the agricultural building skilled Tim Hanstad, his spouse and co-founder of Landesa, recalled in an interview.
“They had been consuming imported caviar and salmon from Norway,” Mr. Hanstad stated, whilst the waterfront slums of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, are some of the maximum determined in West Africa: muddy, crowded, with little get admission to to sanitation or operating water.
“It used to be an excessively sobering revel in finding how badly many of us on this planet reside,” he said in a speech at Claremont McKenna Faculty in 2006, when he won the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Nonprofit Management. The stipulations, he stated, had been “past the purpose of poverty that may describe many of the global’s deficient.”
Disappointed, he left the regulation company in 1965 to show belongings, antitrust and global funding regulation on the College of Washington, already ate up by means of the speculation of the use of his coaching to assist the sector’s rural deficient. “He used to be taking a look to reside a lifetime of goal, of larger goal,” Mr. Hanstad stated.
A pupil pointed him to a law-review article suggesting uncompensated expropriation as a device for land redistribution in Latin The us; Mr. Prosterman surmised that “in the event you attempted to resolve it that approach you could possibly most likely finally end up with civil battle as an alternative 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 The us: Have a Revolution With out a Revolution.” He insisted that “the view that land reform will have to be performed with less-than-full reimbursement of the landlords should be discarded.”
The U.S. Company for Global Building spotted and despatched him to South Vietnam in the course of the Vietnam Struggle as a part of the try to woo peasants clear of the surging Vietcong. Mr. Prosterman got here up with a “land to the tiller” regulation, driven by means of President Nguyen Van Thieu via Vietnam’s Nationwide Meeting, which in 1970 gave possession to loads of 1000’s of tenant farmers in go back for a “respectable worth,” Mr. Prosterman recalled within the 2012 interview. He would incessantly observe that because of the regulation, rice manufacturing surged and rural recruitment by means of the Vietcong plummeted.
Mr. Prosterman used to be widely known for the Vietnam land regulation, which a New York Times editorial known as “one of the vital formidable and revolutionary non-Communist land reform of the 20 th century.” It become his calling card. Nevertheless it used to be now not sufficient to save lots of the Thieu govt.
For Mr. Prosterman, the accomplishment ended in assignments in El Salvador and somewhere else. Most commonly, he didn’t expound world-transforming visions. Land reform, he stated within the 2012 interview, “merely places a given inhabitants — provide or long run — right into a courting with that land base this is most efficient and equitable.”
The results in El Salvador had been blended, as that they had been in Vietnam; once more Mr. Prosterman used to be known as in by means of the Company for Global Building, in 1980, in the course of a civil battle between leftist guerrillas and a right-wing govt supported by means of the US. Mr. Prosterman noted in a New York Instances visitor essay in February 1981 that each left and correct hated the land undertaking he had helped with. However, he wrote expectantly, “40 p.c of all cropland has been transferred to greater than 210,000 peasant households.”
However in Would possibly of the following yr, the New York Instances correspondent Raymond Bonner wrote, “In lower than one month as a legislative frame, El Salvador’s Constituent Meeting has blocked many of the nation’s land redistribution effort from being performed.” Lately, Landesa’s web site merely notes that El Salvador’s land reforms “had some restricted successes at addressing inequality.”
In more moderen a long time Mr. Prosterman targeted a lot of his effort on India, which he stated in 2012 had “the best focus of deficient folks on this planet.” He driven what he known as “new era” concepts, by which India’s state governments would give “microplots,” a 10th of an acre or much less, to landless folks, with “ladies’s names collectively at the name as house owners.”
In one of the most ultimate issues he wrote, in 2009, Mr. Prosterman stated that “little scope stays for normal land-to-the-tiller techniques that use expropriatory find out how to download personal land” to provide farms to tenant farmers. This used to be, satirically, in large part as a result of the decline of “authoritarian” governments, whose lifestyles had made large-scale expropriation more uncomplicated.
“When the facility distances are so nice” between landlord and tenant, “democracies don’t paintings neatly,” Mr. Hanstad defined.
Roy L. Prosterman (the “L” didn’t stand for anything else) used to be born on July 13, 1935, in Chicago, the one kid of Sidney Prosterman and Natalie (Weisberg) Prosterman. His father used to be a businessman. He graduated from South Shore Top Faculty at 16 and from the College of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts at 18 in 1954. He won his regulation stage in 1958.
Mr. Prosterman and his global companions or the group he based won plenty of awards, together with the Gleitsman Basis Global Activist Award for relieving inequality in 2003, the Schwab Basis Remarkable Social Entrepreneur award in 2002, and the College of Chicago Public Carrier Award in 2010.
No speedy members of the family live to tell the tale.
Throughout his occupation, Mr. Prosterman used to be cautious to downplay the political ramifications, versus the human ones, of his paintings.
“The actual fact of giving folks safe rights to a minimum of some small sliver of the earth’s floor,” he stated in 2012, “strongly motivates them to make enhancements that building up manufacturing and make allowance the circle of relatives to make plenty of basic-needs investments.”
