Restitution for Black Farmers
New York Times Editorial
In 1999, African-American farmers won a major civil rights settlement against the United States Department of Agriculture. They had argued that the loans and subsidies they received were substantially lower than those for comparable white farmers. What made matters worse was the fact that Reagan-era budget cuts closed the U.S.D.A.’s civil rights office for 13 years, so most of the complaints filed during that time were never heard. To its credit, the department conducted an internal investigation and discovered that racial discrimination had not only occurred but had also been structurally and historically embedded in its operations.
What looked like a good settlement, promising prompt payment to black farmers, now looks like a failure, according to a new investigation by the Environmental Working Group, an advocacy group. Again and again, these farmers have run up against procedural hurdles that have effectively blocked most of them from receiving payments that were supposed to be automatic. Because of poor record-keeping, the U.S.D.A. seriously underestimated the number of farmers who had been discriminated against. It also did a terrible job of seeking out farmers who might qualify for payments. And it did nothing to help them get the documents needed to demonstrate the loan and subsidy support that neighboring white farmers had received.
This is discrimination by a different name – a continuation, in effect, of the racism historically entrenched in the U.S.D.A. The department’s resistance and the inherent inadequacies in the original settlement have caused a staggering rate of farm failures among small-scale black farmers: three times the rate for white farmers. That has sped up the loss of farmland to development. In the past few decades, the U.S.D.A. has paid only lip service to the survival of small farms. It apparently pays only lip service to civil rights as well. The remedy for this inequity will not be found at the department. Carrying out the settlement with fairness and accountability will require the intervention of Congress.