Thousands of black and other minority farmers in the United States (US) were looking forward to benefitting from President Joe Biden’s farm debt relief plan. However, changes in the country’s debt relief programme could exclude thousands of its originally intended recipients.
The US department of agriculture’s (USDA) plans to distribute debt relief to black farmers have been blocked in court, with some farmers arguing that its racial criteria made it unconstitutional.
The debt relief programme had been cast by Biden’s administration as a form of restitution for decades of discriminatory lending practices by the USDA against black and other minority farmers.
This follows the 2020 election, during which the Biden administration and a new democratic majority in Congress promised to rectify the results of years of discrimination and systemic racism.
Incoming secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack and House Agriculture Committee chair David Scott identified justice for black farmers as a top priority. However, their biggest push to correct historic wrongs was halted.
Farmer advocates say the latest version of the plan to forgive billions of dollars in farm debt risks undermining already-shaky trust between the government and minorities in agriculture.
The new programme, included in the Build Back Better Act (BBBA) now being hashed out in the Senate, would make farmers eligible for debt relief according to their economic insecurity rather than race, Reuters reports.
‘Like breaking a contract with black farmers’
The administration first attempted to forgive $4 billion in debt for farmers of colour through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) in April.
“If black farmers don’t get this debt relief that they’ve been promised, it’s almost like a contract that’s being broken,” Cornelius Blanding, executive director of the federation of southern cooperatives told Reuters.
The USDA sent letters to farmers of color between May and September, promising $2.4 billion in debt relief.
The new debt relief plan would also only relieve the debt of farmers who have loans directly through the USDA’s Farms Service Agency (FSA), excluding farmers with outstanding private loans guaranteed by the agency.
That means some that about 2 100 of the 14 120 farmers of colour who received letters from USDA would no longer meet the criteria because they hold guaranteed, rather than direct loans, according to FSA data. Farmers with direct loans are deemed to be generally more economically distressed than guaranteed borrowers.
In addition to eligibility changes, some believe that the use of economic metrics could itself also leave out some farmers of colour.
A Virginia farmer and president of the National Black Farmers Association (NBFA), John Boyd Jr., said he was worried the new version of the debt-relief programme would prove disappointing to many black farmers too.
“Every time we’re thrown in the pot with everybody else, we don’t get the money,” Boyd told Reuters.
The department of justice is still defending the ARPA debt programme in court, but government is unlikely to win that case. This according to Jessica Culpepper, a senior attorney with Public Justice who represents NBFA and the Association of American Indian Farmers.
The lawsuit is being heard in a court where the judge is likely to follow a decision from earlier this year that found that another ARPA programme that sought to allocate relief by race is unconstitutional, Culpepper said.
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