Roy L. Prosterman, a lawyer who has left the lucrative practice of corporate law to die in the underdeveloped world on February 27 at the Seattlu on February 27. He was 89 years old.
His death was announced by the Institute of Real Rights in Seattlu Landesof which he was the founder. The organization did not determine the cause.
Mr Prosterman worked with governments in about 60 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America for almost six decades, making plans for a certain degree of ownership of peasant families. Sometimes the governments with which he worked with the land obtained are expropriating large tracts, with fees to the owners. In other moments, the government simply gave the land he owned.
Seeing the rights to the land as the key to the abolition of millions of world rural poor people, he pushed the authoritarian governments in places such as Vietnam and El Salvador, as well as democratic in countries in countries like India, to distribute agricultural land to poor farmers.
In the obituary of Landes said 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 “wound and often lonely, acknowledging the voice of land and safety of land in revenge on the poor of the poor in the agrarian economy”, Nobel-Wint, wrote that she wrote in Stigl’s State in the state of Stigll in the state of Stigl. ”(2009), Book edited, and partly written by Mr. Prosterman.
For Mr. Prosterrman, the son of a Russian immigrant, Epiphany arrived at the beginning of her career. As a young high school graduate at Harvard, he hired a job at one of the most prestigious New York’s lawyer for white shoes, Sullivan & Cromwell. In 1963, the company sent it in the impoverished West African nation of Liberia for a client who wants to build a large port there.
“The quarters in which he and his colleagues in the corporate law firm were quite luxurious,” he recalled in an interview, an expert on rural development, Tim Hanstad, his partner and co -founder of Landes.
“They ate a imported caviar and salmon from Norway,” said Mr. Hanstad, while the shores of the capital of Liberia, Monrovia, are among more desperate in West Africa: mud, full, with a small approach to sanitary or liquid water.
“It was a very softening experience revealing how bad many people on the planet live,” said In a speech at Claremont McKenna College in 2006, when he received the Henry R. Kravis Award for non -profit leadership. The conditions, as he said, are “outside the poverty point to describe most of the world’s poor.”
Dissatisfied, he left a law firm in 1965 to teach his property, antitrust and international investments at the University of Washington, but a swallowed idea was to use his training to help the world poor poor. “He asked to live a life of purpose, greater purposes,” said Mr. Hanstad.
The student pointed him to an article for an overview of the law suggesting that incompensable expropriation was as a tool for reducing land in Latin America; Mr. Prosterman assumed “if you would try to solve it that way, you would probably end up with a civil war instead of land reform,” said the New York Times in 2012.
1966 wrote Counterprotage in a review of the right to Washington entitled “Land Reform in Latin America: how to have a revolution without a revolution.” He insisted that “the view that the land reform should be carried out with a less rejected rentern fee must be rejected.”
The US International Development Agency noticed and sent it to South Vietnam in the middle of the Vietnam war as part of the attempt to separate the peasants from the outpatient Vietcong. Mr. Prosterman came up with the law of the “country to Tiller”, pushed by President Nguyen van Thie through the Vietnam National Assembly, which in 1970 gave the ownership of hundreds of thousands of tenants in exchange for a “decent price”, recalled Mr. Prosterman in the 2012 interview. He would often note that as a result of the law, the production of rice grew and recruited the village recruits of Vietcong.
Mr. Prosterman was widely recognized under the Vietnamese Law on Land, which New York Times editorial Called “probably the most ambitious and most ambitious non -communist land reform in the 20th century.” That became his business card. But it was not enough to save the Thieu Government.
For Mr. Prosterrman, the achievement has led to the tasks in El Salvador and elsewhere. Basically, he did not explain the visions that transform the world. The land reform, he said in an interview of 2012, “simply puts the day of the population – the present or the future – into a relationship with that land base that is most productive and righteous.”
The outcomes in El Salvador were mixed, as they were in Vietnam; Again, Mr. Prostermanana was called by the International Development Agency in 1980, in the midst of the Civil War between the leftist guerrillas and the right -wing government supported by the United States. Mr. Prosterman noticed In the New York Times guest, in February 1981, which, both left and right, hated the land project in which he helped. Nevertheless, he wrote optimistically, “40 percent of all crops were transferred to more than 210,000 peasant families.”
But in May next year, the correspondent of the New York Times Raymond Bonner wrote“In less than a month as a legislative body, the Constituent Assembly of El Salvador has blocked most of the efforts on the redistribution of land in the country.” Today Landesa’s website is easy notes El Salvador’s land reforms “had limited success in resolving inequality.”
In recent decades, Mr. Prosterman has focused most of his effort on India, which he said in 2012 was “the greatest concentration of poor people on the planet.” He pushed out what he called the ideas of “New Generation”, in which the Indian state governments would give “microplate”, a dozen acres or less, so that people without land, with “female names together on the title of the owner.”
In one of the last things he wrote, in 2009, Mr. Prosterman admitted that “a little scope remains for traditional programs with the mainland to the tiller using expropriating methods for obtaining private land” to give farmers to farmers. This is paradoxical, mainly due to the fall of the “authoritarian” government, whose existence has made it easier to expropriate a large scale.
“When the distance of power is so large” between the owners and the tenants, “Democracy does not work well,” explained Mr. Hanstad.
Roy L. Prosterman (“L” was not for anything) was born on July 13, 1935 in Chicago, the only child Sidney Prosterman and Natalie (Weisberg) Prosterman. His father was a businessman. He graduated from South Shore High School at 16, and at the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s art in 1854. 1958 he received a degree in law.
Mr. Prosterman and his international partners or organizations he founded have received numerous awards, including the International Activist Award of Gleitsman Foundation for the relief of the 2003 inequality, the Schwab Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneur 2002 and the 2010 University Public Service Award.
No members of direct families survive.
During his career, Mr. Prosterman was careful to reduce political consequences, unlike human works, his work.
“The very fact that they give people safe rights to at least a little small part of the Earth’s surface,” he said in 2012, “it strongly motivates them to make improvements that increase production and allow families to bring numerous investments in the basic need.”
