Roy L. Prosterman (born July 13, 1935) is Professor Emeritus of Law at the University of Washington and the founder of the Rural Development Institute (RDI), which changed its name to Landesa in January 2011.

In the 1960s, Prosterman was working as an associate attorney on Wall Street at Sullivan & Cromwell (where he stayed for six years before taking a job to teach in 1965),[2] but was troubled by the escalating Vietnam War as thousands of impoverished rural farmers desperate to feed their families joined the Viet Cong.

That legislation gave land rights to one million tenant farmers, allowed them to feed their families, cut Viet Cong recruitment by 80%, and increased rice production in the country by 30%.

[3] It was also the birth of the Rural Development Institute (RDI), now called Landesa, an international nonprofit organization working to secure land rights for the world's poorest.

Today, 50 years after Prosterman stood in the rice paddies of South Vietnam, Landesa has worked in 50 countries throughout the world to secure land rights for more than 400,000,000 people.