Seeing land rights as the key to improving the lot of the poor, he pushed both authoritarian governments and emerging democracies to redistribute farmland.
Roy L. Prosterman, a lawyer who left a lucrative corporate law practice to champion land reform in the underdeveloped world, died Feb. 27 at his home in Seattle. He was 89.
His death was announced by Landesa, the Seattle-based land rights institute he founded. The organization did not provide a cause.
Mr. Prosterman worked with governments in about 60 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America for nearly six decades to develop plans to give farming families some degree of ownership. Sometimes the governments he worked with obtained land by expropriating large tracts of land and compensating the owners. In other cases, the government simply gave away the land it owned.
Seeing land rights as the key to improving the lot of millions of rural poor around the world, he pushed authoritarian governments in places like Vietnam and El Salvador, and emerging democratic governments in countries like India, to distribute farmland to impoverished farmers.
In his obituary, Landesa said millions of people had benefited from 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 “an early and often lonely voice recognizing the importance of land access and land security to improving the lives of the poor in agrarian economies,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote in the foreword to “One Billion Rising: Law, Land and the Alleviation of Global Poverty” (2009), a book edited and partially written by Mr. Prosterman.
