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Abstract
Drawing on participatory action research with La Via Campesina’s US member groups, this paper traces the coloniality of US agricultural policy – and the uses of this analytic lens. The framework of coloniality conjures history, contextualizing US Department of Agriculture (USDA) racism within long legacies of subjugation, while paying homage to historical resistance. It raises the stakes regarding the neo-imperialism of agribusiness monopolies, while highlighting divide-and-conquer strategies and the colonialist mentalities that linger on despite reform. Assertions of coloniality, however, risk nostalgia for 18th century pastorals, or may jeopardize hard-fought-for relationships of trust with USDA personnel. Deployment demands self-reflexivity, on the part of academia, which like the USDA is neo-colonial, yet not monolithic. Most importantly however, the discursive impact of coloniality builds upon existing, grassroots articulations of the need to decolonize agricultural policy. Calling out the coloniality of US agricultural policy echoes global revalorizations of peasant agriculture, while overcoming the constraints of the term ‘peasant’ in US-English-speaking contexts. Accordingly, it could facilitate dialogue among grassroots agrarian alliances within the US and, internationally, with international advocacy for peasants’ rights.
Acknowledgements
Foremost, I thank the leaders and members of the Rural Coalition/Coalición Rural and the National Family Farm Coalition for generously sharing their time and expertise. The Dimensions of Political Ecology’s 2015 ‘Agriculture & the Colonial Present’ sessions sparked this paper, and the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Center for Science and Democracy ‘Food Justice & Equity Meeting’ helped develop it. John Zippert, Jahi Chappell, Adam Diamond, Jonathan Fox, Brad Wilson, Paul Lovelace, Naren Kumarakulasingam, Malini Ranganathan, Erin Collins and JPS reviewers all gave challenging and insightful comments, but I claim all errors.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The organization currently has 200 million members through 164 organizations in 73 countries (LVC Citation2015).
2 Facilitating community assessment of US agricultural policy entails mixed research methods with graduate students – from focus groups to agricultural statistical analysis to mapping to participant observation – and collaborative, dialogic analysis with community partners.
3 Since 1978, RC and its
70 grassroots member organizations … seek to build a more just and sustainable food system which brings fair returns to minority and other small farmers and rural communities, establishes just and fair working conditions for farm workers, protects the environment and brings safe and healthy food to all consumers. (Rural Coalition Citation2016)
4 Since 1986, NFFC represents US family farm and rural groups ‘whose members face the challenge of the deepening economic recession in rural communities caused primarily by low farm prices and the increasing corporate control of agriculture’ (National Family Farm Coalition Citation2016).
5 Annual Rural Coalition and NFFC meetings gather member organization leaders, allies, and US Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials in Washington, DC, to strategize agricultural policy reform.
6 GOAT is a diverse, national collaboration working to ‘strengthen capacity of grassroots communities in influencing national food and farm policy’. They focus on ‘equity, justice, and access across the titles of the 2012 Farm Bill and beyond’.
7 At a 2015 Union of Concerned Scientists' Food Equity meeting the NFFC executive director and I participated in, Ihanktonwan Dakota tribal elder Faith Spotted Eagle presented a four-fold framework of life and agriculture in the US: pre-colonial, colonial (when the ‘government said we were doing it all wrong’), post-colonial (the ‘aftermath of devastation’) and neo-colonial (with people ‘doing exactly what the colonizers did’). Decolonizing means ‘deconstructing what we’ve been domesticated to think’. AfroEco founder Sam Grant presented on the urgency of decolonizing food, consciousness and community: ‘colonialism destroys the autonomy of communities for self-determination around food, health, economy, public policy, livelihood. Decolonizing is a necessary aspect of the food sovereignty approach’.
8 One of the few tribal communities to survive the Dawes Act and keep undivided, tribally held original lands was the Menominee. Yet, after the 1954 federal legislation terminating treaty obligations to the tribe, Wisconsin ‘treated the reservation like a colony … to be developed in the larger state interest’ (Lurie Citation1972, 260, emphasis in original), namely extractive timber, taxes and tourism. ‘All the elements of classic colonialism … are clearly discernible in the Menominee situation’ (268).
9 Rural Coalition member groups – Allianza Nacional de Campesinas, Farmworker Association of Florida, La Mujer Obrera, Sin Fronteras and Food Chain Worker Alliance, among others – work diligently for immigration reform as agricultural reform.
10
From Columbus to today, the discoverers have not changed/ … The only thing they understand/Is how to make money/Out of their discoveries/ … The history has been known for a long time, but it keeps being/pushed back even when, one should say, especially when, it/manages to free itself from the shackles of the dominant mind-set … . (LVC Citation2008, 21–22)
11 The 1990 House Committee on Government Operations agreed: ‘Little has changed since 1982 … providing assistance to minority farmers based on their representation in the total farm population serves to further exacerbate the demise of minority farmers … [who received] less than 8% of all loan funds available’ (FSC Citation1992, 18).
12 Black farmers recuperated over a billion lost dollars in the form of cash and tax payments and debt releases. Nearly 90,000 growers filed grievance claims; however, most missed the rapid six-months-later deadline. After a decade, 86 percent of farmers who filed discrimination complaints were unsuccessful. Obama opened a new opportunity for late claims, through the 2008 Farm Bill and the 2010 Settlement Agreement and Claims Resolution Act (Pigford II), which required Congressional allocation of an additional $1.25 billion for valid claimants.
13 The 706 Hispanic farmers and 3210 women farmers whose claims were accepted (only 6 percent of all who filed in total) received forgiveness of farm loan debt and tax relief totaling $200 million – only 15 percent of the $1.3 billion pledged by Congress for the program (Love Citation2015). Many Hispanic and female claimants, according to RC leaders, feel they were discriminated against twice – upon having both their initial loan applications and their USDA settlement claims rejected. Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) and RC requested a meeting with Vilsack, who declined.
14 Shirley Sherrod, a USDA Rural Development director and Pigford leader, was fired by Vilsack, after edited video was released insinuating reverse racism. The full video transcript exonerated her. She declined the USDA offer to re-hire her, and continues to be a community leader in FSC.
15
The vast majority of USDA employees interviewed (in some Agencies, 80–90%) disclaimed knowledge of discriminatory practices or unequal treatment … . The very fact that so many USDA employees did not recognize the real problems of inequitable program delivery is a very serious concern, but may explain, in part, why previous efforts to address USDA discrimination problems have been less than fully successful. (USDA Citation2011b, viii, italics in original)
16 Decades of diligent advocacy – led by RC – secured the program in the 1990 Farm Bill’s Section 2501.
17 The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund (FSC/LAF) and the Land Loss Prevention Project, among other RC and NFFC groups, work to halt and reverse minority land loss.
18 In 1969, Hamer spoke at the second annual meeting of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FCS Citation1992).
19 ‘Customers and potential customers stated that USDA policies and practices, often unintentionally, and sometimes purposely by “bad actors”, result in the unfair treatment and denial of program access which have had a broad and longstanding negative impact’ (USDA Citation2011b, ix). When pressed on this issue by RC leaders at the 2014 meeting, the FSA director admitted to ‘some bad apples’ in county offices, though at the federal level, such discrimination would not stand. This begged the question as to why bad apples would be left to rot and not removed immediately – since one bad apple spoils the whole bushel eventually.
20 RC members La Mujer Obrera grow native foods at their El Paso Café Mayapan while Michael Kotutwa Johnson grows native corn varieties in Arizona Hopi lands (see videos on both at Farm Bill Fairness Citation2016).
21 LVC has successfully elevated the global profile of peasants, endowing the term with ‘a new and contemporary resonance’; at a 2014 Expert Meeting, participants agreed that despite its denigrating connotation in English, the term is used across the world in other languages without disrespect, and widely used and so deserves to be kept as the Declaration title (Gopay Citation2015).
22 Darryl Ray at a 2015 NFFC annual meeting presentation, echoing a recurring point by NFFC member Brad Wilson.
23 The 2015 GOAT meeting workshopped a ‘New Bill of Rights’ to find common principles to ground Farm Bill advocacy.
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Garrett Graddy-Lovelace
Garrett Graddy-Lovelace teaches and researches agricultural policy and agrarian politics at American University’s School of International Service. Drawing on critical geography, political ecology and postcolonial studies, she studies agricultural biodiversity conservation, agrarian cooperatives, and domestic and global impacts of US farm policies. This includes community-based research on Farm Bill reform and on US–Cuba agricultural relations. She has a PhD in geography from the University of Kentucky and a master’s in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School.