The initiative, which is being run through the Agriculture Department, is at the center of the White House’s racial equity agenda.
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration, which has made combating racism a centerpiece of its agenda, is pledging to reverse decades of discriminatory agricultural lending and subsidy policies that have left Black farmers at an economic disadvantage and is racing to deploy $5 billion in aid and debt relief to help them.
At the center of this initiative is the Agriculture Department, an agency that has long been derided by Black farmers as the United States’ “last plantation.” Now the department is in the middle of a drastic overhaul, both of its personnel and of policies that it acknowledges have perpetuated inequality in rural America for years.
On Thursday, President Biden’s agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, said that he would work to root out the vestiges of racism at his agency and to redress “systemic discrimination” that Black farmers had faced.
“Let me be clear: There is no place in the U.S.D.A. for discrimination — none,” Mr. Vilsack said of his department during a congressional hearing.
The number of Black-owned farms has declined rapidly over the past century, to less than 40,000 today from about a million in 1920, the result of industry consolidation as well as onerous loan terms and high foreclosure rates. The Agriculture Department has faced sharp criticism from minority farmer groups for lacking diversity and ignoring complaints of bias in its programs.
Reversing these trends represents a major test for Mr. Biden and Mr. Vilsack, whose nomination was met with skepticism from Black farmers because many of those complaints went unaddressed when he was agriculture secretary during the Obama administration. He is now under pressure to fix the issues amid a racial reckoning that is underway in the United States.
The Biden administration’s renewed focus on lifting the fortunes of Black farmers is yet another sharp departure from the past four years, when President Donald J. Trump lavished economic aid on rural America that disproportionately benefited white farmers. The shift has drawn some criticism from Republican lawmakers, who have described the racially targeted relief as reparations.
The $1.9 trillion economic relief package that passed this month includes more than $9 billion to help farmers.
That includes $8 billion that the Agriculture Department will use toward crop purchases, grants to food processors and distributors, and other programs to help farmers struggling with the pandemic. The stimulus bill also provides $1 billion of aid for farmers and ranchers of color, including outreach, training, grants and loans to improve land access. That money creates funding for a commission that will examine racial equity in department programs, and support for agricultural research and education at historically Black colleges and universities like Tuskegee University.
The bill also provides “sums as may be necessary” from the Treasury Department to help minority farmers and ranchers pay off loans granted or guaranteed by the Agriculture Department, providing debt relief and aid for members of minority racial and ethnic groups that have long experienced discrimination at the hands of the government. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the loan forgiveness provision would cost $4 billion over a decade.
Mr. Vilsack said on Thursday that details on how the program would work would be coming soon. The department estimates that it could provide relief for as many as 15,000 loans. It is asking lenders to halt any farm liquidations tied to loans guaranteed by its Farm Service Agency that were moving forward as it works through its new debt relief process.
American farmers have struggled in recent years as Mr. Trump’s trade wars, particularly with China, Europe, Canada and Mexico, cut off foreign markets. Farm sales to China have now strongly rebounded, but the pandemic continues to strain rural communities and food supply chains, creating painful disconnects between farmers and their markets. With the onset of the coronavirus, many farmers were forced to plow under crops or dump their milk, even as grocery store shelves emptied out and many American families went hungry.
Mr. Vilsack said on Thursday that the pandemic relief money for the agriculture sector disproportionately benefited white-owned farms and that the provisions in the latest stimulus bill were intended to rebalance that.
That was also the case with the trade-related aid money that was doled out in recent years. From 2018 to 2020, the Agriculture Department gave out $23 billion under its market facilitation program to help farmers hurt by Mr. Trump’s trade war. But because those payments were based on a farmer’s crop size, much of the money ended up going to larger and wealthier farmers, who are disproportionately white.
A driving force behind the provisions for minority farmers was Raphael Warnock, the Democratic senator from Georgia whose election in January helped give Democrats control of the chamber. Mr. Warnock had proposed some similar measures in the Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act, legislation he introduced in February with his Democratic colleagues, Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey, Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.
Representative James E. Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat who played an influential role in helping Mr. Biden secure the party’s presidential nomination, has also been a major voice highlighting the experience of Black farmers and helped drive the stimulus provisions, according to congressional staff aides.
The funding aims to address longstanding problems with discrimination at the Agriculture Department — particularly its refusal to grant farmers of color the same access to capital that helped tide over white farmers during difficult periods in history. Minority farmers have confronted other issues, like a lack of access to legal services that have complicated farm inheritances, and a lack of public investment in rural communities and on reservations, including in the water supply and roads and transportation to get farm products to market.
Those factors led to a substantial loss of land. While the number of farmers in the United States has fallen sharply over the past century as farms mechanized and more people found work in factories and offices, Black farmers suffered disproportionately.
According to Agriculture Department data, in 1920, the United States had 925,708 Black farmers, making up 14 percent of farmers in the country. But by 2017, only 35,470 of the nation’s more than two million farms were run by Black producers, or 1.7 percent.
Joe Patterson, 70, whose family has farmed in the Mississippi Delta for decades, said discriminatory lending had forced many Black farmers around him out of business over the years, and led to some lean times for his own family.
Frequently Asked Questions About the New Stimulus Package
The stimulus payments would be $1,400 for most recipients. Those who are eligible would also receive an identical payment for each of their children. To qualify for the full $1,400, a single person would need an adjusted gross income of $75,000 or below. For heads of household, adjusted gross income would need to be $112,500 or below, and for married couples filing jointly that number would need to be $150,000 or below. To be eligible for a payment, a person must have a Social Security number. Read more.
Buying insurance through the government program known as COBRA would temporarily become a lot cheaper. COBRA, for the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, generally lets someone who loses a job buy coverage via the former employer. But it’s expensive: Under normal circumstances, a person may have to pay at least 102 percent of the cost of the premium. Under the relief bill, the government would pay the entire COBRA premium from April 1 through Sept. 30. A person who qualified for new, employer-based health insurance someplace else before Sept. 30 would lose eligibility for the no-cost coverage. And someone who left a job voluntarily would not be eligible, either. Read more
This credit, which helps working families offset the cost of care for children under 13 and other dependents, would be significantly expanded for a single year. More people would be eligible, and many recipients would get a bigger break. The bill would also make the credit fully refundable, which means you could collect the money as a refund even if your tax bill was zero. “That will be helpful to people at the lower end” of the income scale, said Mark Luscombe, principal federal tax analyst at Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting. Read more.
There would be a big one for people who already have debt. You wouldn’t have to pay income taxes on forgiven debt if you qualify for loan forgiveness or cancellation — for example, if you’ve been in an income-driven repayment plan for the requisite number of years, if your school defrauded you or if Congress or the president wipes away $10,000 of debt for large numbers of people. This would be the case for debt forgiven between Jan. 1, 2021, and the end of 2025. Read more.
The bill would provide billions of dollars in rental and utility assistance to people who are struggling and in danger of being evicted from their homes. About $27 billion would go toward emergency rental assistance. The vast majority of it would replenish the so-called Coronavirus Relief Fund, created by the CARES Act and distributed through state, local and tribal governments, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. That’s on top of the $25 billion in assistance provided by the relief package passed in December. To receive financial assistance — which could be used for rent, utilities and other housing expenses — households would have to meet several conditions. Household income could not exceed 80 percent of the area median income, at least one household member must be at risk of homelessness or housing instability, and individuals would have to qualify for unemployment benefits or have experienced financial hardship (directly or indirectly) because of the pandemic. Assistance could be provided for up to 18 months, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Lower-income families that have been unemployed for three months or more would be given priority for assistance. Read more.
“When it all boiled down to it, it was a lack of funds that kept the Black farmers down,” said Mr. Patterson, who spoke by phone from the cab of a tractor he had pulled over to the side of the road. “If we had the same amount of investment that the other farmers had, a lot of Black farmers would still be farming this date.”
He added, “But because they didn’t have those funds, each year would get worse and worse.”
Anthony Daniels, a Democrat in Alabama’s state legislature who serves on the board of One Country Project, a Democratic group focused on rural issues, said that many Black farmers were still suffering from burdensome debt, and that the stimulus provisions would help them pay off loans and related taxes.
“You think about the acres that have been taken due to systematic racism, whether it’s through the U.S.D.A. or others,” said Mr. Daniels, who was raised on a small farm in rural Alabama by grandparents who had been sharecroppers. “It’s long overdue.”
Injecting race into the relief effort has stirred backlash and criticism from some Republican lawmakers who have described the program as a kind of “reparations” for discrimination toward Black farmers.
“If you’re white person, if you’re a white woman, no forgiveness,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said this month on Fox News. “That’s reparations. What does that have to do with Covid?”
Heidi Heitkamp, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota, said that the label was an effort by some to politicize and denigrate the issue, and that policymakers often prioritized small businesses or groups in need.
“The same people who are complaining and using language to try to vilify this priority for African-American farmers are the same people who didn’t say a peep when tens of billions of dollars went out to the richest farmers in America,” she said, referring to payments made to farmers during the Trump administration. “The hypocrisy is overwhelming.”
The sharp focus on racial equity for farmers is an opportunity for redemption for Mr. Vilsack, who was at the center of a racial firestorm during his first stint on the job.
In 2010, he hastily fired Shirley Sherrod, a Black official in the Agriculture Department, after a conservative blogger released a misleading video clip that appeared to show her admitting antipathy toward a white farmer. He later apologized and tried to rehire Ms. Sherrod, who is now executive director of the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education and was a witness in the virtual hearing on Thursday.
At the Agriculture Department, Mr. Vilsack is creating a commission to be a watchdog for racial equity issues at the agency. Under his watch this time, the department has hired the first Black deputy secretary, the first Native American as general counsel and the first Latina woman as deputy under secretary for farm programs.
At the hearing on Thursday, John Boyd, the president of the National Black Farmers Association, told Mr. Vilsack that the onus was on him to integrate minority farmers into the agriculture sector.
“Mr. Secretary, Black farmers need to hear from you that U.S.D.A. is open for business for Black farmers,” Mr. Boyd said. “Black farmers don’t trust the United States Department of Agriculture.”
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