Wolf Ladejinsky
Wolf Isaac Ladejginsky (1899-1975) was an influential agricultural economist and researcher, serving first in the United States Department of Agriculture, then the Ford Foundation and later the World Bank. He was a key adviser on land reform to the governments of several Asian countries, including Japan from 1945 to 1954 (during the Occupation) as well as Mainland China and later Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek, South Vietnam from 1955 to 1961 under Ngo Dinh Diem, and countries in Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. His efforts in Japan and Taiwan were a striking success, but later efforts were frustrated. Improving the welfare of Asian farmers through Agrarian Reform was his goal throughout his long career, earning him praise as "... no typical bureaucrat, but an impassioned reformer."(“Book Notes” 1978:837).
Born in the Ukraine in 1899, Ladejinksy fled the Soviet Union in 1921 as a Jewish refugee from the Russian Revolution (Green 1980:438). He arrived in the US in 1922 and graduated from Columbia University six years later. In 1933 one of his professors at Columbia, Rexford Tugwell, helped him obtain a post in the Department of Agriculture. Two years later he joined the department's Foreign Advisory Service, specializing in Asian problems. In 1945 he was assigned to General Douglas MacArthur's staff in occupied Japan (Book Notes 1978:836), where he played a major role in developing and introducing the land reform program that dismantled a power structure dominated by wealthy landlords. However, Ladejinsky has stated that the real architect of reform was Socialist Hiro Wada, former Japanese Minister of Agriculture (Ness 1967:819).
References
- Review:Book Notes. (1978). The Journal of Economic History 38.3:835-837.
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