Fight against ‘food apartheid,’ push more Black Americans into urban farming | Health News

As Patrice Preston Rogers planted collards, cabbage, and cauliflower this year in a once-vacant lot in East St. Louis, she was prepping for a harvest of hope and better health for the area her dad called home.

Three years ago, before the COVID-19 pandemic took hold,Ronald Preston died at age 75 after suffering from “hypertension, high cholesterol, other dietary issues from residing in a food desert,” said Preston Rogers.

“I inherited this land, and I wanted to do something productive with it,” she said of the plot on North 11th Street, blocks from the Katherine Dunham Museum and steps from a wide swath determined by the USDA in 2019 to have low access to healthy foods.

“I was looking to do … something beneficial, productive with the land. And that’s how I came up with the community garden.”

Just as the coronavirus laid bare health care inequities decades in the making, it exposed gaping holes in society’s food safety net. Across Metropolitan St. Louis, in neighborhoods where livable wages and traditional grocers are in short supply, Blacks already in urban agriculture are expanding and new recruits have joined in. 

Each aims to create home-grown solutions to the redline-induced problem of limited access to healthy foods.

That focus on access, along with the broader racial reckoning wrought by the videotaped murder of George Floyd, has given food justice activists more ammunition. They are targeting not just the absence of retailers but also, and more pointedly, what they see as the systemic racism vexing bereft neighborhoods colloquially known as “food deserts” but which they call sites of “food apartheid.”

After decades of seeing tax credits thrown at corporate-owned grocery stores, both planters and activists are pushing for a more sustainable solution to healthy food access, one that casts people of color in directorship roles and leads to what activists call “food sovereignty.”

“Black people in urban areas are currently and increasingly interested in controlling our food system and resisting against the violence that our people experience through the corporate-controlled food system,” said Dara Cooper, co-founder of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, a coalition focused on “creating a just food and land revolution.”

“I’m not saying we don’t want access to grocery stores, but my point is we want deeper solutions.”

Since the pandemic began, community organizations, nonprofits and the federal government have been scrambling to head off what loomed as a major food catastrophe. 

The deadly virus shuttered businesses, slashing worker incomes. Schools across the nation, a source of food for millions of children, shut down.

In 2020, one in four Black residents across the U.S. experienced food insecurity — more than three times the rate for white households — according to Feeding America, the nation’s largest charitable hunger-relief organization.

Rise of the Black farmer

Against that backdrop, many groups looking specifically to help Black Americans get a shovel in the ground say they have seen exponential growth.

Bryan Ibrafall Wright, founder of the Black Urban Gardening Society based in Oklahoma City, said his group has had “easily” over 30,000 membership inquiries since the beginning of the pandemic. The four-year-old group has accepted about 5,000 new members.

“Many of our members are in low-income communities and they look to agriculture as a means to supplement their diets, their incomes as well,” he said. 

Leah Penniman, co-director of Soul Fire in the City, an urban ag program in New York State, has seen a dramatic increase in participation in that program since the pandemic’s onset — from 10 families to 50 to now 70.

“Since Black folks were and are disproportionately impacted by COVID, it makes sense to see an increase in urban gardening participation at this time,” Penniman said. 

Blacks have been linked to American soil since before a patch of disparate communities became united states. Even after the post-slavery U.S. government went back on its promise of 40 acres and a mule, African Americans have tried to coax a livelihood from the dirt.

In 2017, there were 35,470 farms in the U.S. with Black or African American producers, less than 2% of all U.S. farms, according to the most recent census of agriculture. 

It’s also a fraction of the historical census of Black farmers.

In 1920, of the 6.5 million U.S. farm operators, 925,708 were Black, compared with 5.5 million white farmers, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. African American participation has declined steadily, as Black farmers faced not only the vagaries of weather but also, many say, discrimination from the USDA. 

“Statistically, Black farmers are still underrepresented and under-supported in comparison to their white counterparts,” said LeeAnn C. Morrissette of the National Black Food & Justice Alliance.

Claims against the U.S. government got a very public airing during a class-action lawsuit, known as Pigford, that alleged that USDA discriminated against African Americans who applied for loans or other farm benefits between Jan. 1, 1981, and Dec. 31, 1996. 

In 1999, that case led to what was described as the largest civil rights class action settlement in U.S. history. Many Black farmers, however, still had trouble accessing settlement benefits, according to media reports.

Meanwhile, billions of dollars in debt forgiveness for farmers of color were included as part of pandemic relief. But a judge has put the money on hold following lawsuits filed by white farmers claiming that the program amounts to reverse discrimination, according to John Wesley Boyd Jr., president of the National Black Farmer’s Association. In a segment on  “Good Morning America,” he countered: “they really should be ashamed of themselves … they don’t know what discrimination is.”

“Black people have been slaves,” he said. “We’ve been sharecroppers and survived through horrific laws of Jim Crow. …. And we’ve been discriminated against, from a systematic standpoint, at the United States Department of Agriculture, and it’s time for those things to change.”

Food deserts to food apartheid

The sense that the harm done to people of color, both food producers and consumers, is systematic and not just happenstance or naturally occurring, is behind not only the ire of Black farmers but also of activists working to change the food access narrative, beginning with a change of names.

A review of “food deserts” on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website noted the earliest use of the term was said to be in Scotland in the early 1990s, where it was used to describe limited access to an affordable and healthy diet.

The term caught on in the U.S. and became shorthand for low-income urban areas, with high concentrations of people of color and a distinct dearth of traditional grocers. 

The USDA has changed the name of its former “Food Desert Locator” map to the Food Access Research Atlas. It has not officially used the term “food desert” since 2013, pivoting to the more clinical “low-income and low-access” term, a USDA spokeswoman said.

That verbiage, activists say, omits what they see as a crucial feature of the corporate and political policies that lead to the current landscape — racism.

“In food apartheid, I also use the term food redlining and … Jim Crow, policies are explicitly racialized and explicitly anti-Black, right?” noted Cooper of the Food and Justice Alliance. “Apartheid conjures a more accurate picture of the disparities that we’re addressing, and it also points to the intentionality behind the conditions that Black communities are experiencing within … the mainstream corporate-controlled food system.

“The term ‘food deserts’ ended up erasing the particular anti-Blackness behind what was happening with the corporate-controlled system,” she said.

When accused of abandoning low-income areas, grocers, who operate on notoriously thin margins, routinely point to profit and loss statements that guide them to open in areas with higher incomes and steady foot traffic.

One of the largest food trade groups is FMI, the Food Industry Association, which describes itself as the “champion for feeding families and enriching lives with nutritious, safe and affordable food.”

FMI Director of Media & Public Relations Heather Garlich said in a statement “grocers are open to feedback and conversations to better meet the needs of the neighborhoods in which they serve,” adding, “our industry embraces community in every way possible.”

She did not answer questions about the neighborhoods grocers abandon.

New Black farmers, new hurdles

In urban areas, where backyards and vacant lots are plentiful, a fresh crop of gardeners and farmers has taken root.

The Preston Community Garden marks the last local venture for the family behind Preston Construction, a long-time East St. Louis business. Preston Rogers said the area has long been short on major grocers, though there was some improvement with the 2018 opening of Neighbors Marketplace less than a mile away.

She said the garden is still needed and called assistance from family and local organizations including Gateway Greening, Operation Food Search and the Urban League “a blessing.”

But for other urban ag startups, the ground has been rocky.

Before the pandemic hit, Jamie Edwards took $6,000 from a bonus she earned while working at Amazon and plowed it into a small garden on land leased from St. Louis on the city’s north side, just up the road from a pawn shop, an auto parts store and an official “low access” area. 

“The area is not the safest area …you have all kinds of things going on around you,” she said of the neighborhood where incomes can dip below the poverty line. “But this is where the need for food justice is going on. So that’s why we chose [that] location.”

Following a series of mishaps — including having the young garden accidentally demolished twice — Edwards opted to move her efforts to another city-owned lot about five miles away.  There, she uses raised beds because the underlying dirt is filled with rubble.

Edwards is growing peach and pear trees and hopes to add chickens. Across the street, another vacant lot sports a bumper crop of discarded furniture.

Her nonprofit, City Blossoms, offered to buy the new lot but was rebuffed because Edwards is not a St. Louis resident. So neighbors are attempting to buy the land for her nonprofit, she said.

Karen Robinson-Jacobs is a former St. Louis American / Type Investigations business reporter and Report for America corps member.