Paarlberg, Don 1911–2006

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Paarlberg, Don 1911–2006

(Donald Paarlberg)

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born June 20, 1911, in Oak Glen (now Lansing), IL; died February 14, 2006, in West Lafayette, IN. Educator, government official, and author. Paarlberg was a former professor of agricultural economics who served several posts in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, including an important role shepherding the Food for Peace project in its early years. Spending his young adult life working on his family's farm, he attended Purdue University, where he completed a B.S. in 1940. Paarlberg then earned an M.S. in 1943 and a Ph.D. in 1946, both from Cornell University. He returned to Purdue to teach, becoming a professor of agricultural economics in 1952. He was then lured to Washington, DC, in 1953 to assist the Secretary of Agriculture, and in 1958 he was made assistant to President Dwight Eisenhower, who was organizing the Food for Peace plan at the time. The object of this policy was to ship surplus stores of American food overseas to aid economically troubled areas of the world, an idea Eisenhower hoped would promote peace. When Paarlberg was named assistant secretary, he was put in charge of the plan, which he spent the next three years organizing and running. He returned to teaching in 1961 as Hillenbrand Professor of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University. However, Paarlberg went back to Washington again in 1969 to become director of agricultural economics, and as such he assisted Presidents Nixon and Ford on agricultural policy issues. The author of over a dozen books on economics and agriculture, Paarlberg published such titles as Subsidized Food Consumption (1963), The Great Myths of Economics (1968), and Toward the Well-Fed World (1988). As a side interest, though, he also composed poems, a collection of which was released in 2001.