Black urban farmers in the U.S. sow seeds to end ‘food apartheid’
Penniman, who opened Soul Fire Farm in 2010, lived in a “food desert” in the south of Albany, New York, recalling how hard it was to find fruit and vegetables for her young family as they did not own a car and there was no bus service.
By Thin Lei Win
Reuters
July 29, 2020
Excerpt:
Leah Penniman, co-director of Soul Fire Farm, an urban growing collective based in Petersburg, New York, said the fall in the number of Black farmers reflected decades of discrimination and a backlash over an estimated 16 million acres (6.5 million hectares) of land they owned in 1910.
“Racism and white supremacy are really built into the DNA of the U.S. food system,” said Penniman, author of a book called “Farming While Black”.
She said the same thinking that justified the theft of indigenous lands and the use of slaves as farm labour morphed over decades into new forms of racial discrimination in the country’s food production chain.
Thousands of Black farmers who said they were racially discriminated against for decades by the USDA won $1.25 billion in a court settlement in 2010. A separate $760 million in compensation for American Indian farmers was also announced.
