The world has lost a champion for food security, but his legacy will live on for decades and perhaps centuries to come.

Roy Prosterman passed away on February 27 at the age of 89.

A lawyer by profession, Prosterman is renowned in food security circles for founding Landesa, a nonprofit that advises governments on land tenure reform to benefit farmers in developing countries. It’s a critical piece of this cause that we and so many others are fighting for. “Having strong land rights is basically a prerequisite for [farmers] benefiting from improved technology,” as Grow Further’s founder and CEO Peter Kelly put it.

Landesa was originally called the Rural Development Institute, but its name changed about a decade ago as Prosterman wished to emphasize that “land is destiny,” Peter explained.

Peter knew Prosterman personally. Both based in Seattle, Peter regularly interacted with Prosterman at Landesa’s annual fundraisers back when Peter was developing the vision that would eventually become Grow Further. Though Peter is an agricultural economist, and Mr. Prosterman was a lawyer, the founder of Landesa was a rich source of advice and insight for our founder to lean on and learn from.

“He’s definitely been an inspiration,” Peter said.

The folks at Landesa published a lengthy obituary for their founder. The organization credits Prosterman for delivering legal reforms and extending land rights to smallholder farmers, reforms that “provided life-changing benefits to more than 700 million people” the organization said.

A lifetime of service

Prosterman graduated from Harvard Law School in 1958 and soon after took a job as a corporate attorney for a New York law firm. But something about that role didn’t quite suit him.

He eventually took a job teaching law at the University of Washington. While there, he published a paper that would earn him fame and set him off on a different career trajectory. That paper was titled “How to Have a Revolution without a Revolution” and it made a strong case for securing land rights for smallholder farmers to improve their lives and boost food security globally.

The United States government took an interest and invited Prosterman to advise the government of South Vietnam on land reform for farmers. Working off his ideas, Vietnamese officials firmed up land ownership and titles for farmers throughout the countryside. Relatively simple legal changes based on the ideas of the Harvard-trained lawyer resulted in a 30% increase in rice yields and a massive reduction in poor Vietnamese farmers joining the anti-government rebel forces. It was a revolution without the revolution.

Shortly after that success, Prosterman founded Landesa. ​“Soon, Prosterman found himself called into the fields of Latin America, the Philippines, Pakistan, and other countries to help craft pro-poor land law and reform programs,” Landesa said.

The Seattle philanthropic scene

Peter first met Prosterman in Seattle about a decade ago at a Landesa fundraising event. “He always remembered who I was,” Peter recalled. “We would talk at some length during the reception.”

“As soon as I met him, I knew I wanted to be like this guy,” he added.

They later had dinner together at a downtown Seattle restaurant with a Landesa executive and Donald Summers, one of our advisors who was instrumental in the early history of Grow Further. On that occasion, Peter asked Prosterman to join the Grow Further advisory committee. He ultimately declined the invitation, seeing himself at the end of his career, but he did give Peter a book. It was well-worn and filled with Post-it notes for reference. “It was a book that he had written,” Peter explained. “He not only wrote it, but he showed it to many other people over the years before he gave it to me.”

Peter recalls that Prosterman was a rather private, quiet fellow. He wasn’t gregarious or an outsized figure in the Seattle philanthropic scene like Bill Gates Sr. was. Rather, Peter said Prosterman was frequently traveling overseas attending to Landesa’s work. He avoided the limelight and only went where his advice was appreciated and wanted.

Peter said he and Prosterman bonded in part through their mutual connections to China. Peter was a professor at Renmin University, teaching agricultural economics, and that school was partnering with Landesa at the time. Peter was publishing on the socioeconomic impacts of farm conservation programs in China while his colleagues worked with Landesa to study the effects of improved land rights.

It was around this time that RDI changed its name to Landesa. Peter took notice, eventually deciding to name the organization he founded Grow Further rather than something more technocratic.

Completing the food security picture

Peter is an agricultural economist. Our partners in Africa and (soon) India are mostly agricultural scientists. Roy Prosterman was a lawyer. All three professions complement each other nicely, and all three are critical to achieving better food security globally.

Growing food requires money to purchase the seeds, fertilizers, and farm implements that farmers need. Smallholder farmers also need access to markets, so understanding the economics of food production is critical.

Food is grown mainly outdoors where crops are exposed to all the assaults that nature is capable of—weather, pests, diseases, and more. It takes science to develop hardy, resilient crop varieties that can reliably produce all the food we depend on for survival season after season.

Ultimately before any of this can happen, farmers need land upon which to grow food. And we’ve discovered over and over again that if the farmers don’t own the land or have secure rights to it, they have little incentive to nurture soil and crops. Land tenure is one of the most important pieces of the food security puzzle.

The world is a little more food-secure thanks to the landmark work Prosterman did in land ownership and securing land titles for farmers. He lived a rich, successful life, and he will be missed.

Though Prosterman avoided the limelight, Peter has said for years that he deserved to be more widely known given the contribution he was making to making the world a better place.

“I hope he wins the Nobel Peace Prize that he deserves or at least a World Food Prize.”

 — Grow Further

Photo credit: Roy Prosterman. Wikipedia, Creative/Creative Commons (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0).