BARRACLOUGH, Solon L(ovett) 1922-2002

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born August 17, 1922, in Beverly, MA; died December 19, 2002, in Geneva, Switzerland. Political advisor, forester, educator, and author. Barraclough played a key part, as an agricultural advisor, in U.S.-sponsored agrarian reform in Latin America during the 1960s and early 1970s. He was a graduate of the University of New Hampshire, where he earned a B.S. in 1944, and Harvard University, where he received his M.A. in 1949 and a Ph.D. in 1950. His early education was interrupted by service in the Pacific theater with the U.S. Army during World War II. After earning his doctorate, Barraclough first found work with the U.S. Forest Service, for which he was an economist during the early 1950s. From 1954 to 1958 he was an assistant forester for the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, in which position he fought for equal pay for black workers in the forestry plantation. His efforts were not well received by white administrators, however, and for this reason he left for a job as an agricultural advisor in Lebanon. In 1960 Barraclough was hired by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to work in Santiago, Chile, where he was an educator under the aegis of the Inter-American Committee for Agricultural Development and became project manager of the Agrarian Reform Institute from 1964 to 1973. In this role he worked in Chile with the United Nations and the U.S. government to carry out land reforms aimed at benefitting the lower classes. When a conservative government took power in the 1970s, however, the Chilean military seized land from the peasant classes and gave it back to wealthy landowners. Barraclough tried to rekindle land reform in Latin America by moving his operations to Mexico, but that country also became too right-wing to support his ideas. His later worked involved researching sustainable agricultural development. Barraclough was the author or coauthor of several books, including Agrarian Structure in Latin America (1973), An End to Hunger?: The Social Origins of Food Strategies (1991), and Rural Development and the Environment: Toward Ecologically and Socially Sustainable Development in Rural Areas (1997).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

periodicals

Guardian (London, England), December 31, 2002, p. 15.

Times (London, England), March 3, 2003, p. 28.