Nearly two decades ago a class action lawsuit led by Black farmers against the U.S. Department of Agriculture was settled.
Then there was a class action from Native Americans.
And one from Hispanic farmers.
And then women farmers filed their own.
They all alleged, through various years of examples, that the USDA discriminated against them by denying them access to low-interest rate loans and loan servicing, grant programs and assistance causing them hundreds of millions of dollars in economic loss and record breaking land loss through foreclosures.
But two decades later despite being at the forefront of a landmark case against USDA, Black farmers argue they are still left far behind.
“We’re still struggling,” said Eddie Lewis, a sugarcane farmer in Louisiana. “We’re struggling to the point where we’re going to be extinct.”
Then, President Joe Biden came into office with one little-known goal: bring equity to farming.
“For more than 100 years the USDA did little to alleviate the burdens of systemic inequality for Black, Brown and Native farmers and was often the site of injustice,” the then-candidate stated in his plan for rural America. Referencing class action and large lawsuits brought forth by farmers, Biden vowed to bring equity to the Agriculture Department’s methods of supporting farmers.
As a part of the plan, the Agriculture Department created an Equity Commission. And Congress, led by Democratic Sens. Cory Booker, N.J., and Rafael Warnock, Ga., approved a large debt relief program.
But advocates representing farmers of color say more has to be done.
“It is a behemoth of an operation,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, who sits on the Equity Commission, about USDA. “Many communities, particularly African-American communities, have been left out of understanding how to navigate the many offerings of the department of ag and really leverage opportunities to come out of that to improve their quality of life.”
Mending a damaged history:
Black farmers who should have gotten relief from lawsuits say not all the settlements made it into their hands, resulting in rapid landloss, steep debt and a history of distrust in the department that left farmers behind on accessing capital and programs needed to make their buisnesses thrive.
Over the course of 100 years, the number of Black-owned farmland dropped by 90%, according to Data for Progress due to higher rates of loan and credit denials, lack of legal and industry support and “outright acts of violence and intimidation.”
There are only 48,697 producers who identified as Black, making up about 1.4% of the nation’s 3.4 million producers, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, the latest federal dataset on American farmland demographics. A majority live in the southeastern and mid-Atlantic states.
