After Years of Injustice, Black Farmers Had a Shot at Debt Relief. Then Stephen Miller Stepped In.

[demmiblue]

Cornelius Key, the son and grandson of sharecroppers, does something that was denied to his ancestors: He farms land that he owns. On 400 acres in Baker County, Georgia, he raises peanuts, corn, and cattle. Growing up, Key, 64, remembers that his father would often work the entire year on ground parceled out by the landlord in exchange for a share of the harvest—only to eke out no net income after a season of hard work. “Then you have to borrow money from [the owners] to have something for your family to eat, even during Christmas,” he says. Sharecropping involved a perpetual treadmill of debt, with sparse opportunities to get ahead.

To get a foothold in the area where he was raised—without the benefit of inherited wealth—Key had to turn to a different kind of debt: bank loans, the resource that has been the lifeblood of US farming for a century. The US Department of Agriculture plays a central role in agricultural debt markets, guaranteeing loans and acting as the lender of last resort—and it has used that power in a way that effectively transferred millions of acres of land owned by Black farmers into the hands of white ones. A 2019 US Government Accountability Office report found that minority and women farmers “get a disproportionately small share” of USDA loans; and a July 2021 analysis by Politico reporter Ximena Bustillo showed that in 2020, the USDA approved 71 percent of loan applications from white farmers, versus only 37 percent from Black farmers.

For the Black farmers like Key who survived this great dispossession, debt remains a major burden, one that falls much harder on them than on their white counterparts. Key employs an automotive metaphor to describe what it feels like to owe the USDA’s financial arm, the Farm Services Agency, more than $200,000: “When you have a worn-out truck, you’re scared to get on the road to take a long trip, because you don’t know what might happen—it might cut off; it might make it or it might not.”

This uncertainty, in many ways, just felt like a reality Key would have to live with. Then in March 2021, after years of pressure from groups like the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a Georgia-based nonprofit association of Black farmers where Key works as a state coordinator, Congress took a small step toward redressing the USDA’s long history of racism and making it easier for people like Key to squeeze out a livelihood in agriculture: The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act allotted $4 billion to erase the debt for thousands of farmers of color with outstanding USDA-backed loans. Key’s FSA loan balance would have evaporated.

When Key and some of his Georgia peers first heard about the provision in March, they were still mapping out plans for the growing season. Assuming that the relief would come “pretty quickly,” he says, “we started putting more into this year’s crop than we normally do and started paying off other bills.”

https://www.motherjones.com/food/2021/11/black-farmers-debt-relief-stephen-miller-usda-loans-discrimination/

[Bernardo de La Paz]

1. Here are the two key paragraphs OP title promised but didn't include

But just as Biden’s USDA prepared to dole out the cash, a growing backlash threatened the program. Right-wing political operatives, including white nationalism enthusiast Stephen Miller, former President Donald Trump’s immigration whisperer, launched a swarm of lawsuits against the American Rescue Plan Act’s debt relief plank. According to the complaint from Miller’s group, the program represented unconstitutional “discriminatory racial preferences.” (The complaint did not mention that under Miller’s former boss, an unprecedented gusher of USDA subsidies flowed to white farmers, largely bypassing their Black counterparts.)

Their effort has succeeded so far: In June, after federal judges issued several injunctions, including one responding to Miller’s suit, the program was frozen before a single farmer saw a penny of debt relief.