Rural Coalition

Decline in Minority Farmers

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Land ownership was a positive social force in the African American community. Black-owned farms fed and supported families, sustained communities, and helped thousands of children go to college. Farming supported a black middle class that was more active in social and political affairs. From the land emerged many Civil Rights Movement leaders.

In the current era of retrenchment on civil rights and equal opportunity, where attacks on affirmative action in the job market have become more pervasive, an historic and important economic base that fed the civil rights movement is disappearing. In 1920, of 925,710 African American farmers, 210,000 owned some 15 million acres of land. There were also 50 black-owned banks by 1911. Between 1920 and 1978, the number of white-operated farms declined 63 percent in the United States. In the same period, the number of black farmers in the US fell from 925,710 to 18,816, or by 98 percent. During the same period, the number of Native American-operated farms fell from 1,108 to 600, a drop of more than 45 percent.

Today, the land African-Americans hold is irreversibly slipping away, leaving an entire race of people dispossessed and excluded from the production end of the food system. The continent's first farmers, the indigenous people who first domesticated the crops that now comprise 58% of the world food supply, have not only lost a huge majority of their ancestral lands they have seen their peoples devastated. The lands that remain are often isolated and poor, and Indian farmers have often been totally excluded from the programs of the USDA.

The ramifications of this trend of land loss are grave and far-reaching. If the current rate of loss continues, by the year 2000, there will be no minority farmers remaining. The causes of such land loss are no mystery. Minority farmers have been regularly excluded from purchasing land, denied credit by government and private lenders, and discriminated against in access to federal agricultural assistance programs. Moreover, unscrupulous, manipulative property transfers -- including partition and tax sales, as well as adverse possession -- have deprived countless minority heirs of their rightful land.

Kevin Alexander Gray, in a recent Washington Post editorial, examined how "expressions of deeply rooted racism," such as the recent spate of church fires, bubble to the surface "of a society where ill-conceived public policies target poverty and disenfranchisement of blacks, but not their root cause: the dispossession of African Americans." Gray noted that treating poverty (substandard consumption) and disenfranchisement (substandard power), is easier than addressing the underlying problem of dispossession (substandard ownership of capital) which is "deeply rooted in a legacy of government sanctioned slavery, democratically-approved Jim Crow laws, and socially approved segregation."

He noted that even the civil rights movement of the 1960s settled for "bureaucratically administered welfare and affirmative action," while "repudiating the abolitionists goal of 'forty acres and a mule,' that would have provided private black ownership of capital."

Since the days of Reconstruction, affordable public or private credit -- to raise crops, buy land, purchase seed, feed and fertilizer, and acquire businesses -- has been denied African Americans and most minority people. African American farmers have been excluded from purchasing land and discriminated against in accessing federal agricultural programs. Ironically, the very institution designed to help struggling farmers perpetuated much of the devastating discrimination -- United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). In response to the Great Depression, Congress created the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) (a USDA agency now incorporated into the Farm Services Agency (FSA)), as the "lender of last resort" for farmers unable to obtain credit elsewhere and as a provider of technical assistance to beginning and minority farmers. However, investigations by Congress, the United States Commission on Civil Rights, USDA, and others have uncovered long-standing widespread discriminatory practices by FmHA -- discrimination that has cost minority farmers loan approvals, loan servicing, and farm management assistance.

The discriminatory acts and practices committed by USDA employees in local offices are well-documented. USDA has argued at times that the disproportionate loss in the number of minority farmers is due to economic factors such as the smaller size of the minority-owned operations. Such arguments ignore the existence of racism and certainty denies the deadly combination of economic and discriminatory factors that have a greater adverse impact on minority farmers.

Though practices are similar or worse in other USDA agencies, these have not been investigated in any systematic way. As detrimental as overt discrimination can be, equally damaging is the pattern of neglect by these agencies. Many minority farmers never learn of the many support services available to them, including low interest rates for limited resource farmers and farm ownership loans for socially disadvantaged farmers. Also, minority farmers in financial distress often do not receive reliable and comprehensible advice in time to prevent foreclosure. Field advocates report a continued pattern whereby minority farmers who come in to apply for various conservation and credit programs are told that applications are not available for another several weeks. When they return, they are then told that all resources are committed.

National FSA and USDA offices have given tacit approval to local discrimination by their consistent failure to collect data necessary to track and document discrimination and its impact on the minority land base, by their failure to hold local employees accountable for discriminatory acts and practices, and their failure to investigate in good faith complaints of discrimination and to give a remedy even when an agency of the Department has found that discrimination has occurred. The net effect has been to give local and state offices a carte blanche to do as they please with respect to obeying civil rights laws.

The House Government Operations Committee conducted an investigation with a hearing in 1990 and concluded "[t]he sad truth is, little has changed since [the 1982 report] and that "ironically, FmHA has been a catalyst in the decline of minority farming."

Now finally, after many decades and administrations of denying that there was a problem USDA has stepped up and admitted that there has been a problem. The recent findings of the USDA Civil Rights Action Team (CRAT) commissioned by Secretary Glickman are no surprise to anyone who has been a farmer or who has worked with minority farmers. What is different is that the CRAT work and report indicate a willingness on the part of the USDA national leadership to admit that these problems exist -- and are not just figments of the imaginations of thousands of people -- and that USDA must take steps to clean up its own house.

The impact of discrimination and neglect is self-evident. Minority farmers are now going out of business at 3.24 times the rate of majority farmers,1 up from 2.75 times the rate of other farmers at the beginning of the 1980s. This uprooting of our communities has had huge consequences. Full restitution for these losses can never be made. But today, we urge the Congress the Administration to recognize the full gravity of this situation and to implement measures that, not only help those farmers still in operation to recover from their losses, but also ensures that the Department commences to fairly serve all of its customers. We also urge Congress to adopt a proactive approach and set in place programs of a scale necessary to rebuilt the minority land base in this nation and that allows those who have lost land or never had access to land to reestablish the roots of our community on the land.