Roy l. Prosterman, 89, dies. I worked to secure land for the rural poor

Roy d. Prosterman, the lawyer who left a profitable legal practice for the landscape championship in the backward world, on February 27 at his home in Seattle. It was 89.

His death was announced by the Seattle Land Institute of Residents nationWhich was the founder. The organization did not specify a reason.

Mr. Prosterman worked with governments in about 60 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America for almost six decades, formulating plans to give a degree of property to farmers’ families. Sometimes the governments with which they worked with the lands obtained by confiscating large areas, with compensation for the owners. At other times, the government simply gave the land it owns.

When seeing the rights of the land as a key to raising millions of poor in the world, authoritarian governments pushed places such as Vietnam and El Salvador, as well as the emerging democracy in countries such as India, to distribute agricultural lands to poor farmers.

In Landesa from Looks He said Millions of people have benefited from the programs established by Mr. Proserman and his group. Landisa, founded in 1981, was the Institute of Rural Development at the University of Washington and became an independent organization in 1992, “an early voice, often alone, realizes the importance of land and security security in raising the lives of the poor in laws, which is led by laws, and the innovative economy.” Poverty “(2009), a book edited and partly by Mr. Prosterman.

For Mr. Prosterman, the son of a Russian immigrant, the Dhatta Day came early in his career. As a young graduate at Harvard University Law Faculty, he got a job in one of the finest white shoe law firms in New York, Sullivan & Cromwell. In 1963, the company sent him to the poor West Africa nation to a customer looking to build a large port there.

“The circles that he and his colleagues were in the corporate law firm residing in it very luxurious.”.

“They were eating imported caviar and salmon from Norway,” said Mr. Hansad, while the poor, the capital of Liberia, while the poor neighborhoods in the Liberian capital, among the most desperate in West Africa: muddy, crowded, with little access to sanitation or running water.

“It was a very realistic experience to discover how bad many people are on the planet,” He said In a letter at Clairemont Makina in 2006, when he received the Henry R Prize. Cravis in non -profit driving. He said that the circumstances were “outside the poverty point that would describe most of the world’s poor.”

Unhappy, the law firm in 1965 left property teaching and anti -monopoly and international investment law at Washington University, which is already consumed by the idea of ​​using his training to help rural poor in the world. Mr. Hansad said: “He was looking forward to living a larger purpose.”

One of the student referred to an article review of the law indicating an unparalleled confiscation as a tool for the redistribution of lands in Latin America; Mr. Prosterman stored it “if you try to solve it in this way, it is possible that you will end up with the civil war instead of land repair,” it is. ” The New York Times was told In 2012.

In 1966 it is books A review of a resistance in favor of Washington’s law entitled “Land Reform in Latin America: How to obtain a revolution without a revolution.” He insisted that “the opinion that land reform must be implemented with less compensation than the owners must be disposed of.”

The American Agency for International Development noticed and sent it to southern Vietnam in the middle of the Vietnam War as part of an attempt to attract farmers away from the growing Vietning. Mr. Prosterman reached the “Land to Tiller” law, which was paid by President Najwin Vano through the National Assembly in Vietnam, which in 1970 gave ownership of hundreds of thousands of rented farmers for a “decent price”, as Mr. Prosterman said in an interview in 2012. It was often noticed that as a result of the law, the production of rice and rural employment decreased by VietCong.

Mr. Prosterman was widely recognized for the Vietnam Land Law, who a New York Times editorial “Perhaps Reform is called the most ambitious and non -communist lands in the twentieth century.” It has become his communication card. But it was not enough to save the Theio government.

For Mr. Prosterman, the completion has led to al -Silfador and other places. Mostly, he did not explain the visions that turned into the world. “Simply puts specific residents – present or future – in a relationship with the land base that is the most productive and fair,” he said in an interview in the 2012.

The results in El Salvador were mixed, as they were in Vietnam. Once again, in 1980, Mr. Prosterman was summoned by the International Development Agency, in the midst of a civil war between the left -wing guerrilla war and the US -backed government. Mr. Prosterman male In a guest article in the New York Times in February 1981, the left and the right hated the land project that helped him. However, he wrote with optimism, “40 percent of all crop lands have been transferred to more than 210,000 farmers.”

But in May next year, Raymond Bonner, the New York Times correspondent books“In less than one month as a legislative body, the component of El Salvador prevented most of the country redistribution efforts.” Today, Landsa simply Notes Al Salvador lands “have achieved some limited successes in addressing inequality.”

In recent decades, Mr. Proserman focused on many of his efforts on India, who said in 2012 “was” the highest focus of the poor on this planet. ”What he called the ideas of the“ new generation ”, in which state governments in India will present“ fine plates ”, which is ten acres or less, for people who do not have land, with“ common women’s names for the title as owners. ”

In one of the last things he wrote, in 2009, Mr. Prosterman admitted that “the small range remains for the traditional programs from the ground to the hammer that uses methods designed to obtain private lands” to give farmers to tenants. This was very paradoxically due to the decline in “authoritarian” governments, whose existence made the ease of widespread confiscation.

“When power distances are very large,” between the owner and the tenant, “democracies do not work well,” explained by Mr. Hansad.

Roy was born. Prosterman (“L” he had nothing) on ​​July 13, 1935, in Chicago, the only child of Sydney Prosterman and Natalie (Wespress) Prosterman. His father was a businessman. He graduated from South Shore Secondary School in 16 and from the University of Chicago with Bachelor of Arts in 1854. He obtained a certificate in law in 1958.

Mr. Prosterman and his international or organization that he founded for a number of awards, including the International Foundation International Award for Activists for Unemployment in 2003, the Schwab Foundation award Enterpreneur Award in 2002, and the Chicago University General Service Award in 2010.

There are no direct family members alive.

During his career, Mr. Prosterman was keen to reduce the repercussions of political repercussions, rather than his human work.

He said in 2012: “The fact that people have given safe rights to at least some small shrapnel from the surface of the Earth, stimulating them strongly to make improvements that increase production and allow the family to make a number of basic investments,” he said in 2012.