More than four decades ago, Roy Prosterman left a high-paying job at a white-shoe law firm in search of a different kind of job satisfaction. He ended up finding it in Landesa, a Seattle-based nonprofit that he founded, which works to secure land rights for the rural poor in countries around the world. Founded in 1966, the group is better known by its former name, Rural Development Institute. Today, Landesa has 120 employees; it has operated in more than 50 countries, including China, Vietnam and Russia, and says 100 million families have benefited from its work. Thirty percent of the group's $13 million annual budget is spent in India.
Mr. Prosterman, 77, an emeritus professor of law at the University of Washington, has received wide recognition for his efforts, including the Gleitsman International Activist Award, which honors leadership in social activism, and the inaugural Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice, in 1993 and 2003.
India Ink recently interviewed Mr. Prosterman via e-mail about his interest in land rights, the challenges of working in India and why he thinks his model works.
What sparked your interest in land rights in the first place, and made you give up a lucrative law career?
In the 1960s, I was a young lawyer traveling for clients for extended periods to Liberia and Puerto Rico. Then I left the practice of law to teach property, antitrust and international investment law at the University of Washington Law School, not really knowing where that was going to take me.
The sudden “spark†happened when of one of my law students asked me what I t hought of a recent law review article that argued that land reform for the landless poor in Latin America could be carried out cheaply, by using various legal theories to trace land rights back through lengthy periods of intervening time, and take land away from present holders without paying for it.
My immediate reaction was that it certainly sounded as though the issue of deep poverty related to landlessness was a huge one, but if you tried to solve it that way you would likely end up with civil war instead of land reform.
If you were really serious about resolving the problem, those countries' governments and international aid donors would have to come up with the necessary resources to acquire the needed land at a fair price, and then redistribute it.
So what were your next steps?
I set to work on a law review article that set forth that critique, which came to the attention of U.S.A.I.D., and I ended up as a land-law consultant for a U.S.A.I.D.-c ommissioned study of the land-tenure situation in South Vietnam, as the Vietnam War was raging. It didn't take much research or fieldwork to see that the Vietcong were drawing their support largely from the tenant farmers who were the great bulk of the rural poor, promising them land of their own if they won.
I ended up doing the basic formulation of a land-to-the-tiller law, and then advocating for it in the U.S. and South Vietnam. The law was adopted in 1970, and a million tenant-farmer families became owners of the land they tilled. The original landlords were paid a decent price, though partly in bonds that had not all matured when the communists took over.
The twin results of this reform were that rice production went up by 30 percent and indigenous Vietcong recruitment in the South went down from a range of 3,500 to 7,000 men a month to 1,000 a month.
How did you come to focus on India?
India has the highest concentration of poor people on the p lanet, and most of them are rural and (as I could see from fieldwork that I began as far back as 1972, as well as desk research on the literature) lack secure rights to land of their own.
What are the specific programs you carry out in India now?
The “new generation†measures that we are now working on, in various combinations, in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, West Bengal, and Odisha, prominently include state governments which allocate small house-and-garden plots (a tenth of an acre or less) to the completely landless rural poor. These plots have women's names jointly on the title as owners. The relatively small amounts of land needed come either from existing public lands or from negotiated government purchases of private land. We also provide training and local deployment of paralegals and “Community Resource Persons†to help local administrators ensure actual possession, title documentation and presence in the land records. We are also using paralegals to help deal with small errors, omissions or inconsistencies in the key documents relating to rural land rights and deal with land-rights issues for the large network of self-help groups serving poor rural women.
What are some of the challenges you face in working in India?
A built-in one is that land issues are a subject for state-level action under the Indian Constitution.
In India, the Center can have a role in funding state measures, cajoling and urging, but the Center can't actually make or implement the legal rules as to land rights. Thus Landesa needs a separate presence in each state where we are offering advice, as well as in Delhi. Another challenge is found in the frequent turnover of many senior and midlevel civil servants, at the state level, and to some extent in Delhi: this means that new relationships often need to be formed, and officials often need time to come “up to speed†as to land-related programs.
Another challenge affect s “convergence,†on programs such as allocation of house-and-garden plots, where a variety of related support measures may be needed to gain full benefit from the small parcel, from help with housing to water wells, to technical assistance for vegetable growing.
These activities may involve a number of different government departments, whose actions may need various kinds of coordination or speeding up.
Your model relies a lot on partnership with governments - why, and how does this work?
Large-scale pro-poor land tenure reform programs require the strong and effective support of a government to be approved, formulated and carried out. And there are additional considerations: to get various departments to act together to assist the new recipient of a micro-plot, it is extremely helpful to get signals coming from as close to the top as possible.
In an Indian state, it is very desirable that the chief minister fully understands, and is fully behind, the program, sending signals to that effect all down the line. The support of the central government, coming from the top, is also highly desirable, in India and elsewhere. So we try, fairly early, to arrange to meet with the topmost policy makers: the prime minister or chief minister, as well as the cabinet minister or ministers and senior civil servants involved in rural land issues.
In some country settings, we may find that there is no interest whatsoever - or even hostility.
Have you run into situations where Landesa's work or motivation has been questioned?
Not in recent years, but back in the Cold War days. For example in El Salvador in the early 1980s, we were sometimes attacked by both extremes of the political spectrum for our land tenure work.
How do you see the issue of land rights for the world's poorest playing out over the next decade or two?
Largely through a range of new approaches, which will encourage governments to become wi dely and actively involved in land rights for the poor. At the same time, there may be new challenges, such as large-scale land acquisitions by foreign governments, companies or “portfolio investors†that will have to be identified, and solutions that protect land rights of the poor will need to be crafted and implemented.
Would it not be better to provide many of these people skills that could get them a good manufacturing or service sector job, rather than giving them a small piece of land that will at best let them eke out a living, and at some point be subdivided between their children?
Keep in mind that land reform neither creates nor destroys land. It simply puts a given population â€" present or future â€" into a relationship with that land base that is most productive and equitable. Also keep in mind that the very fact of giving people secure rights to at least some small sliver of the earth's surface strongly motivates them to make improvements that increase production and allow the family to make a number of basic-needs investments that are likely to strongly affect the variables in your question: better-nourished children are less likely to die in infancy or early childhood; lower infant and child deaths, in turn, reduce the pressure to have more children.
This lays the groundwork for a smaller next generation and increased family resources also go to educating both girls and boys for longer periods. There are a number of successful examples of these things happening.
