12/5/2019 Obituary: Solon Barraclough | News | The Guardian

Solon Barraclough
The man behind the land reform programmes in 1960s Latin America whose work
became essential to the anti globalisation movement
Tue 31 Dec 2002 01.09 GMT

The radical American scholar Solon Barraclough, who has died in Geneva aged 80, was a world
expert on peasants, land reform and rural development. A sometime professor at Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York, the most important part of his life was spent working in Latin
America for the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). There he was the
spearhead and the intellectual author of the 1960s land reform programmes that were
supported by the United States as a response to the Cuban revolution.
By preference a field-worker, Barraclough was never happier than when out in the countryside
talking to peasants. He was an able and inspirational administrator, organising FAO research
and training programmes in Chile and Mexico, and later for the UN Research Institute for
Social Development (UNRISD) in Geneva.

Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, he acquired a knowledge of practical farming on his parents'

New Hampshire farm. Following wartime US army service, he was profoundly influenced by
the experience of living in a destroyed and defeated Japan in 1945-46.

After studying economics at Harvard with Joseph Schumpeter, JK Galbraith and Wassily
Leontief, he worked as a US Forest Service economist, and for several years was employed as a
forester and farm manager. In 1952, given charge of a University of Tennessee-owned forestry
plantation, he paid for an increase in the wages of the largely black workforce, by raising funds
through mechanisation and improved marketing. He was soon in trouble with the local white
elite, after ordaining equal pay for black and white workers, and giving both groups equal
chances of promotion. After four years' struggle, he was obliged to leave, and set off for the
wider world.

After a spell as a forestry adviser for the US government in Lebanon, he focused on Latin
America's agricultural problems. Working for the FAO in Chile at the end of the 1950s, he was
the right man in the right place in 1961 when President Kennedy launched the Alliance for
Progress, a programme for Latin America designed to undercut support for Fidel Castro's
Cuban revolution.

High on the alliance's agenda was a commitment to state planning and to land reform -
masterminded by Barraclough behind the scenes at the inaugural conference at Punte del Este
in Uruguay - to which all Latin American governments gave their reluctant support.
Barraclough, with agreement from the Chilean government and FAO and UN Development
Programme funds, set up an institute in Santiago for research and training in agrarian reform
(ICIRA), that was designed to flesh out the land reform proposals. ICIRA's task was to study the
land tenure situation in each Latin American country, and then train the agrarian technicians
who would oversee land reform.

In Barraclough's eyes, reform was not just a response to Cuba, but necessary if Latin America's
immense peasantry was not to be forced into the shanty-towns surrounding the cities. In the
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12/5/2019 Obituary: Solon Barraclough | News | The Guardian

conservative atmosphere of 1960s Latin America, where many members of the governing class
came from the old landed elites, ICIRA's work was often perceived as "communistic", but
Barraclough persevered for more than a decade.

His disciples, inspired by his charismatic integrity, spread the word around the continent,
while he himself played an influential role in Chile, sustaining the land reform process that was
begun by the Christian Democrat government of Eduardo Frei, and continued - with the
existing legislation - by the more radical government of Salvador Allende in the early 1970s.

ICIRA's detailed studies of the land tenure situation in half a dozen other Latin American
countries are now recognised as perhaps the most significant and valuable piece of socio-
economic investigation in Latin America in the 20th century. Without Barraclough's visionary
insistence on research as the key to subsequent action, in the teeth of opposition on the
ground and within the FAO bureaucracy, the ICIRA studies would never have got off the
ground.

In September 1973, during the military coup against Allende, Barraclough's house and institute
were raided by the Chilean military, and he became persona non grata. ICIRA was closed
down, the land reform was reversed, and the old landlords seized back the land from the
peasant cooperatives that had been farming it during the previous decade. As Barraclough had
prophesied, without the support of the land reform process the peasants would inevitably be
driven into the cities. To add insult to injury, a small proportion are now bussed back annually
to bring in the harvest on the new agri-business farms that export Chilean food and wine
production globally.

After that coup, Barraclough revived ICIRA in Mexico, but as more of Latin America fell under
right-wing military rule, land reform was a priority neither for the military governments nor
for the US. Barraclough became head of UNRISD, specialising in "sustainable development".

With some of his colleagues from Latin America, he began research programmes concentrating
on the adverse social impact of the "green revolution", and examining the causes of famine.
His researches soon became essential for the anti-globalisation movement, concerned about
the impact of neo-liberalism on the third world poor.

He retired from UNRISD in 1984, but remained a consultant for numerous governments and
non governmental organisations, writing and travelling until illness confined him to his home.

Barraclough was a 1930s Rooseveltian Democrat, with a passionate, simple belief in the need
to help the poor in their struggle against the rich and powerful. "You can never expect to win,"
he used to say, "but the greatest sin is to give up trying."

He was married for many years to Franny, with whom he adopted three children in Chile. In
the 1970s, he married Isabel, with whom he had two sons. Both his wives, and his five children
survive him.

· Solon Barraclough, economist, born August 17 1922; died December 19 2002

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