A new era of civil rights? Latino immigrant farmers and exclusion at the United States Department of Agriculture

Minkoff-Zern, Laura-Anne; Sloat, Sea

doi:10.1007/s10460-016-9756-6

Cited by 29 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Policy discrimination was not limited to African Americans. For many decades dating back to the Reconstruction Era, the USDA systematically discriminated against Black, Native American, Latinx, and women farmers in its credit lending and commodity payments (Daniel, 2013;Minkoff-Zern and Sloat, 2017). While Blacks were receiving just 1 percent of farm ownership loans as of 1982, Native peoples continued to have their agrarian history, expertise, and opportunities undercut through land loss, including a federal courtsanctioned seizure of Wind River Indian Reservation lands in 2017.…”

Section: Political Economic Origins Of Us Agriculturementioning

confidence: 99%

Securing the future of US agriculture: The case for investing in new entry sustainable farmers

Carlisle

Wit

DeLonge

et al. 2019

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

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Sustainable agriculture is among the most urgently needed work in the United States, for at least three reasons: we face an environmental crisis, a health crisis, and a rural economic crisis. Addressing these pressing crises through sustainability transition will require growing our agricultural workforce: both because the current farm population is aging, and because sustainable agriculture is knowledge-intensive work that substitutes experiential knowledge of farm ecosystems for harmful industrial inputs. Given its social value, sustainable agriculture ought to be a welcoming profession. But at present, US agriculture is decidedly unwelcoming for nearly all who work in it – and it puts new entry and sustainable farmers at a distinct disadvantage. In this paper, we first examine why it is so hard to enter and succeed in sustainable farming. We find that new entrants struggle to gain critical access, assets, and assistance, encountering substantial barriers that stand between them and the land, capital, markets, equipment, water, labor, and training and technical assistance they need to succeed. Secondly, we review promising policy and civil society interventions targeted at addressing these barriers, nearly all of which have already been piloted at the local and state levels or through modest public funding. These interventions are most effective, we find, when they are linked up through robustly governed networks to provide “wraparound” coverage for new entry sustainable farmers. Such networks can help patch together complementary sources of support (e.g. federal, state, local, NGO, cooperative) and synergistically address multiple barriers at once. Finally, we propose additional interventions that are more aspirational today, but that could offer important pathways to support new sustainable farmers in the longer term.

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Section: Political Economic Origins Of Us Agriculturementioning

confidence: 99%

Securing the future of US agriculture: The case for investing in new entry sustainable farmers

Carlisle

Wit

DeLonge

et al. 2019

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…White farmers have long been beneficiaries of loans and subsidies from the USDA designed to discourage over-production and enable access to new technologies. This support was historically denied to black farmers, Native American farmers, Latino/a farmers and women farmers, and all four of these groups are in various stages of the process of suing the USDA for redress (Gilbert et al 2002, Minkoff-Zern andSloat 2016). Even today, because of generational wealth, white individuals are more likely to be able to leverage social networks to access capital investments to start green food businesses (Fairlie and Robb 2008).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food justice: cultivating the field

Glennie

Alkon

2018

Environ. Res. Lett.

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“…Since the early 2000s, activists and scholars alike have invoked food justice as a rallying cry to critique both the corporate food regime (Friedmann 2005 ) and the tendency of the ‘alternative food movement’, when challenging the industrial agri-food system, to ignore social inequities (Agyeman and Alkon 2011 ; Born and Purcell 2006 ; Sbicca 2019 ). Generally nested within the broader fields of critical food studies and agrarian studies, the food justice lens focuses attention on inequities at play in the sphere of production (Minkoff-Zern and Sloatt 2016 ; Sbicca 2019 ), such as labor conditions and access to land and other resources, as well as those manifest in the sphere of consumption, such as uneven access to healthy food (Heynen et al 2012 ) or the elitism of local food (Guthman 2008 ). Recent work underscoring inequities in food service (Coplen 2018 ; Jayaraman 2013 ; Sbicca 2015 ) draws much needed attention to the spheres of food distribution, processing, and preparation.…”

Section: Land Justice: Building On Food Justice As a Social Movement mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…After emancipation, the legacy of slavery endured through Jim Crow sharecropping and the dispossession of Black farmers from their land (Wood and Gilbert 2000 ). There has been no formal reconciliation process to address either of these two major thefts, and US agriculture continues to depend on the exploitation of migrant labor on stolen land (Minkoff-Zern and Sloat 2016 ).…”

Section: The Case For Comparing the United States And Francementioning

confidence: 99%

Translating land justice through comparison: a US–French dialogue and research agenda

et al. 2021

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In this discussion piece, eight scholars in geography, urban planning, and agri-food studies from the United States (US) and France engage in a bi-national comparison to deepen our collective understanding of food and land justice. We specifically contextualize land justice as a critical component of food justice in both the US and France in three key areas: access to land for cultivation, urban agriculture, and non-agricultural forms of food provisioning. The US and France are interesting cases to compare, considering the differences and similarities in their colonial and agricultural histories, persistent and systemic race and class-based inequities in land access, and the roles of public bodies and social movements. In this paper, we synthesize literature, share reflections, and offer directions for future scholarship, including a broader comparative research agenda. An important difference we found is in the degree of scholarly attention to race and how it mediates access to land. We also observe that few scholars articulate a clear definition of justice in their work, nor do they share a common justice framework. We hope that this paper contributes to a more robust food and land justice framework for the use of scholars, practitioners and activists.

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A new era of civil rights? Latino immigrant farmers and exclusion at the United States Department of Agriculture

Cited by 29 publications

References 17 publications

Securing the future of US agriculture: The case for investing in new entry sustainable farmers

Securing the future of US agriculture: The case for investing in new entry sustainable farmers

Food justice: cultivating the field

Translating land justice through comparison: a US–French dialogue and research agenda

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