Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Consumer Law Blogs -> ThePopTort

Consumer Law

: ThePopTort

Farm Justice

By Joe Consumer

Civil rights and farmers.  These are not terms you often hear in the same sentence but thanks to years of relatively recent discrimination by the United States Department of Agriculture, they are forever linked.  

During the early 1980s, several African-American farmers began a movement to try to force the USDA to stop discriminating against black farmers over ?price support loans, disaster payments, operating loans and farm ownership loans.?  But as the St. Petersburg Times reports,

Nothing happened. Then, in 1997, Timothy Pigford, a North Carolina black farmer, filed a lawsuit against the USDA.?

In 1999, Pigford and about 2,000 other farmers in the class action settled for $50,000 apiece to avoid prolonged litigation. Thousands of other black farmers were unaware of the Pigford vs. Glickman class-action lawsuit and missed the deadline for filing. The USDA disqualified thousands of others. [John Wesley Boyd Jr.] led an effort, known as the Black Farmers Late Claim Bill, to ensure that some 80,000 black farmers would receive compensation.

In January, the administration announced a $1.2 billion agreement to settle the claims against the USDA, one of the biggest civil rights settlements ever. Congress was given a March 31 deadline to approve the funds. Lawmakers conveniently left Washington on March 23 for a two-week break, thereby missing the deadline for approving the funds.

CNN reports that ?Congress now has a target date of the end of May to come up with a plan. The problem is that under new federal PAYGO rules, Congress must balance any increased spending with equal savings elsewhere. The other option would be to designate the settlement as an emergency, which would be exempt from PAYGO.?  (See more coverage here.)  But the Administration has told the farmers that this situation ?does not meet the administration's criteria to be designated as an emergency.?

CNN commentator Roland Martin recently wrote,

It's understandable that Congress doesn't want to add more to the growing U.S. deficit, but what about the enormous opportunities denied to these black farmers for years by the same federal government? These men and women weren't asking for a handout. They were using their own hands to till land, grow crops, provide a way of life to send their children to college, and grow and prosper like every American. But it was clear racism that denied them of that opportunity. Thousands of dollars were provided for white farmers to build and grow, and if they received any money at all, hundreds were thrown their way.

This generation of Americans, when confronted with the past sins of racism, often remark that slavery and Jim Crow was so long ago. But we are talking about men and women who have fought a racist system in the last 20 to 30 years. They are the victims of racism, so why should Congress continue to deprive them by not setting the money aside?

Meanwhile, farmers continue to die off. John Wesley Boyd Jr., president of the National Black Farmers Association, has been relentlessly lobbying on this -  in between funerals.  He asks, ?How many more eulogies will I deliver before we see some justice?"

Full post as published by ThePopTort on April 26, 2010 (boomark / email).