Manuel Casanueva Ramírez

Juan Manuel Casanueva Ramírez (Santiago, 15 August 1907 – Santiago, 4 January 1984) was a Chilean agricultural engineer and politician, a member of the United Conservative Party. He served as a Minister of State during the governments of Presidents Juan Antonio Ríos and Jorge Alessandri.

Biography Family and education He was born in Santiago, Chile on 15 August 1907, the son of Joaquín Casanueva Soto and Zoraida Ramírez Díaz. He completed his primary and secondary education at the Liceo of Linares, in south-central Chile. He later moved to the capital and enrolled at the University of Chile, where he qualified as an agricultural engineer in 1927, presenting the thesis Manufacture of cellulose from Chilean forest species.

Political career In 1929, during the government of President Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, he joined the Ministry of Agriculture, where he held several positions, including inspector, campaign chief, and department head, among others. In 1939 he was appointed by President Pedro Aguirre Cerda, a member of the Radical Party of Chile, as head of the Department of Plant Health, and in 1941 as director general of the Directorate of Agriculture.

On 6 October 1944, he was appointed to head the Ministry of Agriculture, as well as the Ministry of Lands and Colonization, by President Juan Antonio Ríos; he left both cabinet posts on 14 May 1945. During his tenure at the Ministry of Agriculture, he collaborated on and directed the Agrarian Plan until its approval. His period in office also saw the enactment of the dairy promotion law, the law on wine-growing cooperatives, and the law regulating the seed trade.

Subsequently, on 16 September 1960, he again assumed the office of Minister of Agriculture, this time under President Jorge Alessandri. He left the ministry on 26 August 1961, eleven months after taking office.

Among other activities, he served as a councillor of the Chilean Association of Agricultural Engineers; was a member of the Treaty Commission of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; of the Agriculture Commission of the state-owned Corporation for the Promotion of Production (CORFO); and of the Chilean Agronomic Society.

He received the Order of Agricultural Merit from the Republic of Ecuador. He died in Santiago on 4 January 1984, at the age of 76.

Written work Manufacture of cellulose from Chilean forest species, Santiago, 1927.