Berkeley Food Institute Panel: The Ongoing Fight of Black Farmers for Land and Sovereignty

Illustration by @artifexjay

Woven into the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion bill that passed in March of this year, is a long awaited and overdue package: around $4 billion in debt relief and loans to BIPOC farmers. For many Americans this bill, along with creation of the Justice for Black Farmers Act of 2020, is their introduction to the plight of Black farmers in America. However, decades of anti-Black discrimination in agriculture and an ongoing struggle in response have created the force that has pushed the needle toward this historic moment in which legislation that will provide relief to Black farmers is on the table. 

In the early 20th century Black farmers owned more than 16 million acres of land and provided food for much of the American population. Now, just over 100 years later, Black farmers have ownership of just 4 million acres of farmland, and only 1 out of every 100 farmers is Black. This rapid decline in Black land ownership in agriculture is no accident, and has certainly nothing to do with the knowledge Black farmers have on the land; Rather, discriminatory practices by government agencies and private entities and businesses have systematically dismantled the right that countless Black farming communities have to soil, seeds, and prosperity. 

On October 28, 2021, the Berkeley Food Institute brought together a panel of Black farmers, organizers, scholars, and activists to bring awareness to the ongoing struggles of Black agrarians and share their stories of anguish, resilience, and hope. Because the majority of Black farmers reside in the southern United States, their battle is one that is rarely discussed among west coast academic institutions such as UC Berkeley nor is it the hallmark of urban agroecology movements growing in the Bay Area. This virtual panel, Justice for Black Farmers: A Conversation to Uproot Racist Policy and Plant Seeds of Redress, sought to both introduce and amplify the demands of Black women on the frontlines of the movement for relief for Black farmers, whether that be working the land, in academia, drafting up policy, or in a courtroom.

The panel, moderated by Elsadig Elsheikh, Director of the Global Justice Program at the Othering & Belonging Institute, began with a seemingly straightforward question to the farmer panelists: how much does the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) owe your families? Angela Provost of Provost Sugarcane Farm in Louisiana responded that along with the cancellation of loan debt for two million acres of farmland, the USDA owes her family “peace of mind, dignity, and respect.” Carolyn Jones, a lifetime farmer and the President and CEO of Mississippi Minority Farmers Alliance reported concisely that the USDA is withholding over $5.8 million rightfully owed to Jones and her husband, as well as is responsible for deliberate repair to Southern rural farming communities such as her own which have been destroyed over decades by the USDA’s discriminatory practices. 

Like most small scale farmers in the United States, Provost and Jones depend on annual loans to cover necessary costs in between harvest seasons. However, Black farmers tend to face more difficulty in securing loans from the USDA and are forced to operate while falling into debt. Moreover, the USDA has a tendency to rush foreclosures of Black owned farms and prompt private lending agencies such as banks to reject loan requests from Black farmers. In turn, the USDA has been deemed “the last plantation” by many Black farmers and activisits due to the legacy of chattel slavery that the USDA continues to uphold and the culture of anti-Black racism that is woven into the fabric of the USDA. Provost further explained this concept by first pointing out that statistically, Black households have lower levels of debt in comparison to their white counterparts; However, while white farmers are able to use debt to improve their farms and expand their land, Black farmers “are held in a system of servitude” and kept in perpetual debt peonage by the predatory lending practices of the USDA. 

In order to contextualize the introduction of the Justice for Black Farmers Act and the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act, it is first important to recognize the ongoing movement through the latter half of the 20th century for debt relief and against anti-Blackness in the USDA. Pigford vs. Glickman was a landmark class-action lawsuit that was built on the claim that the USDA was negligent in regards to complaints filed by Black farmers between 1983 and 1997 and consistently discriminated against Black farmers on the basis of race. According to panelist and organizer of the Cancel Pigford Debt Campaign Tracy McCurty, the Black farmers involved in the Pigford campaign demanded not only debt cancellation, but repossession of their land, federal tax relief, and “access to non-extractive capital.” The settlement of Pigford legitimized the anti-Black racist culture and practices of the USDA in court, but the gross underestimate of farmers who filed a claim meant that despite reaching a settlement, exhaustive relief for all was not granted. 

"Black legacy farmers and their families standing in front of the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington, DC.
Courtesy of Gary Grant, Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association. March 2, 1999."

McCurty further explained that the $50,000 payouts that went to Black farmers did not come close to rectifying the true economic harm done. She reported that some estimates of what is owed to Black farmers is upwards of $250 billion. Panelist and legacy Black farmer Bernice Atchison was a part of the original Pigford case and her ongoing persistence and determination has led her to be a face of the dispossessed Black farming population. Atchison recounted that her testament at the 2004 Judiciary Hearings helped solidify that the injustices underpinning Pigford were “so pervasive… it was such that we could never overcome it.” She followed up quickly by stating that regardless of the relief that contemporary legislation may provide to Black farmers, it will never repay the years of her life spent in courtrooms for Pigford, the generational wealth in her family that was decimated, nor the lives of her children and husband that were lost through her battles with the USDA. 

Through Pigford and beyond, anti-Blackness in the USDA has been well documented and codified in judicial systems and reports for decades, but tangible actions to uproot racism from the USDA are seldom and ineffective. Panelist Dr. Cheryl Harris, author of keystone article Whiteness and Property and critical race scholar unpacked the fraught and nuanced relationship that Black people have with law in the United States. Dr. Harris pointed out that despite anti-Black discrimination being proven in court, debt relief is treated as a gift that Black farmers may receive — contingent on the will of governing bodies and agencies — rather than a right that is owed to Black landowners who have been continuously dispossessed of land and wealth. She continued by describing the phenomenon in which Black claims to property ownership are consistently treated as lesser than those of white people because Black people have been forced to fight through a legal system that “inconsistently at best ever recognized their rights.” Dr. Harris described Critical Race Theory as a framework to examine systems, particularly the judicial system, to understand how they are formed to favor certain outcomes that benefit those at the top of the racial and economic hierarchy. Despite laws that are blatantly discriminatory or racist no longer being on record, the legacy of these laws and policies is upheld in order to perpetuate racial harm and economic inequality. The term “systemic racism” has become more prevalent in our collective lexicon over the past two years, and Critical Race Theory can be used as a tool to closely analyze systems in order to expose implicit racism in policies, principles, or practices. Despite the history of racism in US laws, Dr. Harris concluded that the law is an imperfect tool, not a useless one, that has the potential to advance beneficial legislation for Black farmers and their communities through collective action and struggle.

When discussing the foundation of generation wealth and prosperity in the United States, all the panelists centered their responses around land. Atchison proclaimed that “land is pure gold… land is wealth” and from it one can feed themselves and their families, maintain a place to live, and gain independence in the face of oppression. McCurty expanded upon this sentiment by pointing out that the right to land was at the crux of the original Pigford case, and that the USDA fought viciously to deny Black farmers their right to repossess land. Jones corroborated by pointing out that if land wasn’t valuable everyone would have access to it, and the fight for land ownership is not confined to the boundaries of a single farm. Rather, land ownership creates wealth for rural communities, including elderly farmers, the youth that may take over the farm one day, and social programs and institutions that serve the population. Dr. Harris expanded the conversation surrounding land ownership by placing it in the context of the two core dispossessions that Critical Race Theory is built on: the enslavement of Africans and the colonization of Indigenous land and peoples. Because property rights are built on these dispossessions, property is perceived as something to exclude others from and something to exploit. Powerful notions of land that transcend Western principles and instead represent a source of renewal and life are not a component of property ownership in the United States. 

With colonial and racist systems underpinning our institutions and food insecurity in the Bay Area on the rise, conversations that amplify voices of individuals on the frontlines fighting for land, seeds, and sovereignty are similarly inspiring as they are deeply important. The Berkeley Food Institute created a panel in which Black women with different occupations and experiences — united under the fight for justice, freedom, and equity — could bring the history and current state of Black farming in the south to UC Berkeley. Education surrounding the plight of Black farmers is noticeably absent from much of the core curricula within Rausser College of Natural Resources, as are Black professors, which may be impacting the experience of Black students on our campus. Improved representation, comprehensive Black history, and the use of Critical Race Theory in classrooms are steps that could be taken to both amplify the history of Black agrarianism and orient our campus firmly against anti-Black racism.

The panel drew to a close with Elsedig asking the panelists to offer advice to young people, to which Bernice Atchison replied, “do your part toward advancing the cause… one person cannot shoulder it by themselves. It’s too much.” She continued, “realize the value of the earth that you stand on, use it well, take care of it, and it will take care of you.”