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Vol. 75/No. 9      March 7, 2011

 
Black farmers discuss
USDA discrimination
 
BY JACOB PERASSO  
ALBANY, Georgia—More than 250 Black farmers and others met here February 12 at the 28th Annual Georgia Farmers Conference. They came from South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, many joining the discussion on how to fight ongoing discrimination against Black farmers. The conference was organized by the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund.

Farmer James Hunt spoke from the floor of the conference about difficulties in getting credit from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), noting how credit scores are used to deny loans to farmers. Another participant said there are no Black faces in rural USDA offices. “I know they qualify” for the jobs, she added.

Some 14,000 complaints of discrimination were filed with the USDA between 2001 and 2008. Lloyd Wright, an adviser to Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack, told the conference the USDA believes only 3,800 should be settled, and the statute of limitations had expired on most of them. It will take an act of Congress to pass an extension in order to resolve them, he said. In 1999 Black farmers’ claims of decades of discrimination by the USDA were upheld in federal court. The Pigford v. Glickman settlement ordered the government to give claimants a $50,000 payment, debt forgiveness, and preferential treatment in future loan applications. Of the 22,547 claims that were considered, 41 percent were denied. Many farmers didn’t even learn about the settlement until after the initial deadline, resulting in some 75,000 claims being filed “late.” Only 2,200 of these were considered for compensation as part of the 1999 settlement. Phil Fraas, an attorney in the Pigford case, said that it will be several months before a six-month period begins where all farmers who filed “late” and were not considered before will have to file another claim.

Lawsuits on behalf of Native American and Latino farmers who have been discriminated against have followed the fight of the Black farmers. Ramiro Vega, a farmer who came to the conference from Ashburn, Georgia, explained that he has been denied loans several times and suspects it is because he is Latino.

Vega also said that his mother, Beatrice Vega, was denied a USDA loan in Turner County, Georgia, 11 times between 2006 and 2010, She has a pending civil case against the USDA for discrimination.

“We are tired of being discriminated against,” Beatrice Vega told the Militant in a phone interview. “We are the only Latino farmers in the area.” Seeing the unity of Black farmers in pressing their fight, “I finally got the courage to go to the office of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and this was the first conference we attended,” she said.  
 
 
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