{"id":13169,"date":"2025-03-15T21:00:27","date_gmt":"2025-03-15T21:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/site.itshrt.com\/worldnews\/roy-l-prosterman-89-dies-worked-to-secure-land-for-the-rural-poor\/"},"modified":"2025-03-15T21:00:27","modified_gmt":"2025-03-15T21:00:27","slug":"roy-l-prosterman-89-dies-worked-to-secure-land-for-the-rural-poor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/site.itshrt.com\/worldnews\/roy-l-prosterman-89-dies-worked-to-secure-land-for-the-rural-poor\/","title":{"rendered":"Roy L. Prosterman, 89, Dies; Worked to Secure Land for the Rural Poor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- ItShrt World News -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"1882483372\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-0\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Roy L. Prosterman, a lawyer who left a lucrative corporate law practice to champion land reform in the underdeveloped world, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Seattle. He was 89.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">His death was announced by the Seattle land-rights institute <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.landesa.org\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Landesa<\/a>, of which he was a founder. The organization did not specify a cause.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Prosterman worked with governments in some 60 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America over nearly six decades, crafting plans to give a degree of ownership to peasant families. Sometimes the governments he worked with obtained land by expropriating large tracts, with compensation to the owners. At other times, the government simply gave away land it owned.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-1\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Seeing land rights as the key to lifting up the world\u2019s millions of rural poor people, he pushed authoritarian governments in places like Vietnam and El Salvador, as well as emerging democratic ones in countries like India, to distribute farmland to impoverished farmers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-2\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In an obituary, Landesa <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.landesa.org\/press-and-media\/obituary-roy-l-prosterman\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">said<\/a> that millions of people had benefited from the programs created by Mr. Prosterman and his group. Landesa, which was founded in 1981 as the Rural Development Institute at the University of Washington and became an independent organization in 1992, was \u201can early, and often lonely, voice recognizing the importance that access to land and security of land has in uplifting the lives of the poor in agrarian economies,\u201d the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in the preface to \u201cOne Billion Rising: Law, Land and the Alleviation of Global Poverty\u201d (2009), a book edited and partly written by Mr. Prosterman.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">For Mr. Prosterman, the son of a Russian immigrant, the epiphany came early in his career. As a young Harvard Law School graduate, he landed a job at one of the most prestigious of New York\u2019s white-shoe law firms, Sullivan &amp; Cromwell. In 1963 the firm sent him to the impoverished West African nation of Liberia for a client looking to build a large port there.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThe quarters that he and his colleagues in the corporate law firm were staying in were quite luxurious,\u201d the rural development expert Tim Hanstad, his partner and co-founder of Landesa, recalled in an interview.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThey were eating imported caviar and salmon from Norway,\u201d Mr. Hanstad said, while the waterfront slums of Liberia\u2019s capital, Monrovia, are among the most desperate in West Africa: muddy, crowded, with little access to sanitation or running water.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-3\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cIt was a very sobering experience discovering how badly many people on the planet live,\u201d he <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=8U1eMwdpktM&amp;t=3s\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">said<\/a> in a speech at Claremont McKenna College in 2006, when he received the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Nonprofit Leadership. The conditions, he said, were \u201cbeyond the point of poverty that would describe most of the world\u2019s poor.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Dissatisfied, he left the law firm in 1965 to teach property, antitrust and international investment law at the University of Washington, already consumed by the idea of using his training to aid the world\u2019s rural poor. \u201cHe was looking to live a life of purpose, of greater purpose,\u201d Mr. Hanstad said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">A student pointed him to a law-review article suggesting uncompensated expropriation as a tool for land redistribution in Latin America; Mr. Prosterman surmised that \u201cif you tried to solve it that way you would likely end up with civil war instead of land reform,\u201d he <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/archive.nytimes.com\/india.blogs.nytimes.com\/2012\/09\/25\/a-conversation-with-landesa-founder-roy-prosterman\/index.html\" title=\"\">told The New York Times<\/a> in 2012.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In 1966 he <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/core.ac.uk\/reader\/267975450\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">wrote<\/a> a counterproposal in Washington Law Review titled \u201cLand Reform in Latin America: How to Have a Revolution Without a Revolution.\u201d He insisted that \u201cthe view that land reform should be carried out with less-than-full compensation of the landlords must be discarded.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The U.S. Agency for International Development noticed and sent him to South Vietnam in the middle of the Vietnam War as part of the attempt to woo peasants away from the surging Vietcong. Mr. Prosterman came up with a \u201cland to the tiller\u201d law, pushed by President Nguyen Van Thieu through Vietnam\u2019s National Assembly, which in 1970 gave ownership to hundreds of thousands of tenant farmers in return for a \u201cdecent price,\u201d Mr. Prosterman recalled in the 2012 interview. He would often note that as a result of the law, rice production surged and rural recruitment by the Vietcong plummeted.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-4\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Prosterman was widely recognized for the Vietnam land law, which a <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/timesmachine.nytimes.com\/timesmachine\/1970\/04\/09\/354827772.html?pageNumber=40\" title=\"\">New York Times editorial<\/a> called \u201cprobably the most ambitious and progressive non-Communist land reform of the 20th century.\u201d It became his calling card. But it was not enough to save the Thieu government.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">For Mr. Prosterman, the accomplishment led to assignments in El Salvador and elsewhere. Mostly, he did not expound world-transforming visions. Land reform, he said in the 2012 interview, \u201csimply puts a given population \u2014 present or future \u2014 into a relationship with that land base that is most productive and equitable.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">The outcomes in El Salvador were mixed, as they had been in Vietnam; again Mr. Prosterman was called in by the Agency for International Development, in 1980, in the midst of a civil war between leftist guerrillas and a right-wing government supported by the United States. Mr. Prosterman <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1981\/02\/08\/opinion\/salvador-land-reform-and-us-policy.html\" title=\"\">noted<\/a> in a New York Times guest essay in February 1981 that both left and right hated the land project he had helped with. Nonetheless, he wrote optimistically, \u201c40 percent of all cropland has been transferred to more than 210,000 peasant families.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-5\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">But in May of the next year, the New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1982\/05\/24\/world\/salvador-blocks-the-enforcement-of-land-program.html\" title=\"\">wrote<\/a>, \u201cIn less than one month as a legislative body, El Salvador\u2019s Constituent Assembly has blocked most of the country\u2019s land redistribution effort from being carried out.\u201d Today, Landesa\u2019s website simply <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.landesa.org\/who-we-are\/global-impact\/el-salvador\/\" title=\"\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">notes<\/a> that El Salvador\u2019s land reforms \u201chad some limited successes at addressing inequality.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-6\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In more recent decades Mr. Prosterman focused much of his effort on India, which he said in 2012 had \u201cthe highest concentration of poor people on the planet.\u201d He pushed what he called \u201cnew generation\u201d ideas, in which India\u2019s state governments would give \u201cmicroplots,\u201d a tenth of an acre or less, to landless people, with \u201cwomen\u2019s names jointly on the title as owners.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">In one of the last things he wrote, in 2009, Mr. Prosterman acknowledged that \u201clittle scope remains for traditional land-to-the-tiller programs that use expropriatory methods to obtain private land\u201d to give farms to tenant farmers. This was, paradoxically, largely because of the decline of \u201cauthoritarian\u201d governments, whose existence had made large-scale expropriation easier.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cWhen the power distances are so great\u201d between landlord and tenant, \u201cdemocracies don\u2019t work well,\u201d Mr. Hanstad explained.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-7\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Roy L. Prosterman (the \u201cL\u201d did not stand for anything) was born on July 13, 1935, in Chicago, the only child of Sidney Prosterman and Natalie (Weisberg) Prosterman. His father was a businessman. He graduated from South Shore High School at 16 and from the University of Chicago with a Bachelor of Arts at 18 in 1954. He received his law degree in 1958.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<div data-testid=\"companionColumn-8\">\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">Mr. Prosterman and his international partners or the organization he founded received a number of awards, including the Gleitsman Foundation International Activist Award for alleviating inequality in 2003, the Schwab Foundation Outstanding Social Entrepreneur award in 2002, and the University of Chicago Public Service Award in 2010.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">No immediate family members survive.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">During his career, Mr. Prosterman was careful to downplay the political ramifications, as opposed to the human ones, of his work.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-at9mc1 evys1bk0\">\u201cThe very fact of giving people secure rights to at least some small sliver of the earth\u2019s surface,\u201d he said in 2012, \u201cstrongly motivates them to make improvements that increase production and allow the family to make a number of basic-needs investments.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<aside class=\"css-ew4tgv\" aria-label=\"companion column\"\/><\/div>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script>\r\n<!-- ItShrt World News -->\r\n<ins class=\"adsbygoogle\"\r\n     style=\"display:block\"\r\n     data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-6606220950177433\"\r\n     data-ad-slot=\"1882483372\"\r\n     data-ad-format=\"auto\"\r\n     data-full-width-responsive=\"true\"><\/ins>\r\n<script>\r\n     (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});\r\n<\/script>\r\n<br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/03\/15\/world\/roy-prosterman-dead.html\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Roy L. Prosterman, a lawyer who left a lucrative corporate law practice to champion land reform in the underdeveloped world,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13170,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[620,441,1489,471,2784,4258,959,4257,3349,4259,829],"class_list":["post-13169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-agriculture-and-farming","tag-deaths-obituaries","tag-el-salvador","tag-india","tag-land-use-policies","tag-landesa","tag-poverty","tag-roy-l-prosterman","tag-rural-areas","tag-rural-development-institute","tag-vietnam"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Roy L. 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