Op-ed: 4 Solutions to Make Urban Ag Policies More Equitable
Black Americans lack access to food and land—and city leaders often actively disrupt efforts to build food sovereignty. These policies could address the systemic injustices behind food apartheid and help urban ag scale up nationwide.
By Anthony Nicome
Civil Eats
September 21, 2023
Excerpt:
Up until 2013, many Black residents in Detroit were not able to cultivate food for their communities due to urban agriculture ordinances and zoning laws that prevented residents from operating urban farms on public city-owned land.
In Baltimore, urban agriculture is permitted on city-leased land. But that land is also in demand. Cherry Hill Urban Community Garden, a 1.5-acre urban farm managed by the Black Yield Institute (BYI) on city-leased land, received an eviction notice in spring 2021. Baltimore City, which had proposed building affordable housing units on the land that houses the community garden, notified BYI of its imminent removal by the end of 2021.
Many community members and researchers believe, however, that affordable housing units and community gardens can co-exist as they do in other sites throughout the U.S. They see the recent events as yet another example of African American communities bearing the burden of inequitable urban policy that has historically and disproportionately robbed Black people of opportunities to thrive.
