News Coverage
Federal Farm Subsidies: Why Latinos Don
Published November 16, 2003
Latino farmers in California and other states are pressing a $20 billion class-action lawsuit charging decades of discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) against Hispanic farmers and ranchers who were unfairly denied access to federal farm loans. Already a former U.S. undersecretary of agriculture, Dallas Smith, has testified it is an "undeniable fact that the administration of . . . farm programs was and is pervaded by systemic racism and anti-minority bias."
The Latino farmers say the denial of loans was deliberate discrimination, practiced by secretive and unelected USDA loan review committees that almost invariably included only Anglo farmers. But there is another, more subtle but no less unjust, policy that discriminates against Latino farmers, and every five years it is debated openly in Congress: the way billions of dollars in federal farm subsidies are distributed.
According to an Environmental Working Group analysis of federal data, only one in nine Latino farmers are eligible for aid under current federal policy, compared to 40 percent of all farmers nationwide. It's not because their skin isn't the "right" color, but because they don't grow the "right" crops.
In the latest available USDA Farm Census, 4,515 farms were owned by Latinos nationwide. Most Hispanic farmers or ranchers are found in just five states - California, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and Florida - and about 40 percent of them raise cattle. A disproportionately large number of Latino farmers - 24 percent, three times the national average - produce specialty crops like fruits, nuts and vegetables.
But neither cattle nor specialty crops are eligible for federal subsidies, which mostly go to well-off agribusinesses producing grains and cotton. As a result, only 11 percent of Latino farmers grow the crops that qualify for traditional commodity subsidies.
The disparity is made more severe because the overwhelming majority of federal subsidies don't go, as taxpayers suppose, to support small family farmers struggling to stay on their land - a situation all too familiar to most Latino farmers. Instead, most subsidy checks go to larger, highly profitable agribusiness operations, and the bigger the farm, the bigger the check. Some of these subsidy-enriched farms are owned by absentee "farmers" who live in places like Beverly Hills, others by Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron and DuPont. Environmental Working Group's online database of federal subsidy records, available at www.ewg.org
The inequities in a system that arbitrarily favors soybean farms in the Midwest over cattle ranches in the Southwest, and large agribusinesses over small family farms, are scandalous. In California, as in the nation, the top 10 percent of recipients get 71 percent of the payout. But only nine percent of California farmers receive subsidies, compared to 75 percent in Iowa and 69 percent in Nebraska.
For Latino farmers in California, that's a double whammy. Latinos own about six percent of the farms in California. From 1995 to 2002, California farmers received a total of $4 billion in subsidies. Based solely on their share of farm ownership, Latinos should have received $240 million of the total, but actually received only $53 million.
One way to make the system more fair is to shift money from crop subsidies for the few into subsidies that will help all farmers and ranchers take better care of their land and the surrounding environment. The Conservation Reserve Program provides payments to farmers and ranchers to take environmentally sensitive land out of production and protect it by planting grasses or trees. And the Environmental Quality Incentives Program helps farmers and ranchers defray the costs of conservation measures on working lands.
The federal farm subsidy system encourages overproduction, harms our drinking water quality by encouraging polluted runoff and hurts small family famers. Finally, it is discriminatory against farmers who don't grow the "right" crops - a category which just happens to include 90 percent of Latino farmers.
Why should we continue to provide billions in direct payments to the overwhelmingly largest producers of certain, favored crops? A fair system of federal farm aid should support struggling family farmers, whether they're growing fruit or raising cattle - no matter what their ethnic background.
