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Black farmers face setbacks over Trump budget cuts: ‘We are in survival mode'

Black farmers face setbacks over Trump budget cuts: ‘We are in survival mode'

The Guardian20-03-2025
For the last several weeks, Jocelyn Germany has been asking herself 'is it safe for us to exist' as Black farmers?, since US Department of Agriculture cuts have put her work in jeopardy.
Germany is the farmer advocate of Farm School NYC (FSNYC), an urban agriculture education center focused on food sovereignty and social, economic and racial justice. Around 85% of Farm School NYC's funding comes from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The center was in the process of launching a New York City-wide pilot initiative focused on food justice, crop management and urban farming advocacy. But National Institute of Food and Agriculture's (NIFA) $300,000 community food projects grant that would have funded it was terminated, effectively immediately. Forced to scramble, FSNYC scaled down the programming and adopted a sliding scale for tuition.
The cuts affected other plans, including public courses on food stewardship. Funding that would have allowed the center to distribute mini grants and grow community capacity has also been paused. FSNYC recently discussed cutting some of its own employee benefits to free up resources for the now impacted programming. 'Our main goal is to keep Farm School in operation,' Germany said.
The impact of USDA cuts has rippled through farming and agriculture communities, which are mobilizing to stanch the damage. Farm School NYC is part of the Black Farmer Fund, a consortium of BIPOC-led/owned farms and entities that work on agricultural policy and strengthening local food systems throughout the north-east. The group was founded to share resources in an already difficult funding environment; rather than compete with each other, they collaborate on joint fundraising and programming.
Now, they share an estimated $1.2m gap due to defunding. For Farm School NYC and Black Farmers United – New York State (BFU-NYS), the USDA's termination or freezing of National Institute of Food and Agriculture grants and Natural Resources Conservation Service contracts put programs and salaries at risk.
'We are in survival mode,' Germany said. Over the past year, Farm School NYC began taking baby steps to transition some of its funding away from government dollars, but 'the sudden defunding was not the way we wanted to do it', added Germany.
Made up of growers, advocates and food educators, BFU-NYS just became an independent organization after being a fiscally sponsored project under Farm School NYC. It lost a five-year, $660,000 contract with the USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service agency. The contract was to fund three annual statewide 'Bridging Land, Agriculture, and Communities' conferences, with the inaugural one planned for April.
About a week after Donald Trump's inauguration, Black Farmers United got an email explaining that because their work fell under diversity, equity and inclusion programming, the USDA would end their contract. This year's conference was canceled, but BFU-NYS plans to host one in 2026 with or without government funding. The organization is seeking private donors to make that happen.
The abrupt withdrawal of funding has left the organization holding the bag for an event that was just around the corner – and all its costs. 'We have done the background work, got participating partners, submitted deposits and signed contracts,' said Dr Kuturie Rouse, BFU-NYS's executive director of development.
The organization is now unable to reimburse full-time staff for extra time spent coordinating the conference or recoup the cost of supplies. On top of that, BFU-NYS must pay vendors and other collaborators despite no longer having the USDA money or this year's conference itself. 'The organization is already at a loss,' Rouse said.
BFU-NYS also lost its Green Futures program. The program helps young adults battle food insecurity, establish community gardens and pursue agriculture as a career. Last year, it launched a pilot program with a South Bronx middle school where students grew watermelon, callaloo, lettuce and other fruits and vegetables. The students then gave that food to their school cafeteria to feed the student body. BFU-NHYS now hopes to partner with other local schools to continue and grow the initiative.
Aside from the loss of money and programming, Rouse said that the mental health of BFU-NYS staff has taken a hit. After the inauguration, staff were bombarded with racist emails and social media comments. 'It was hate mail just because of our name and who we support and sponsor.' He clarified that while 'Black' is on the organization's name and it focuses on communities of color, it is a nondiscriminatory organization that 'work[s] with any and everyone'.
And, at this extremely critical and stressful time, mental health support from another ecosystem partner will not happen. The Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust (NEFOC) supports climate stewardship and regenerative farming. It also serves as an incubator for several regional land projects. Christine Hutchinson, a founding board member of the land trust, shared that a $200,000 collaborative program focused on farmers' mental health from Maine to Delaware is now on hold indefinitely. NEFOC is one of several organizations that contributed to it. 'People are really rocked,' Hutchinson said.
It's been difficult for Monti Lawson, the founder of the Catalyst Collaborative Farm, to see so much funding halted because he encouraged many farmers and other partners to take advantage of these USDA programs. The farm, which invites queer and Bipoc people to the land to farm and organize, offers many free, donation-based or sliding-scale events – all possible due to previous funding. 'For government and even philanthropy, QTBipoc was a very sexy word,' Lawson said.
Lawson has been connecting with past funders and community members. 'In this particular moment, there are so many people who are reaching out, trying to be comforted, trying to be connected to others,' Lawson said.
The land trust's Hutchinson pointed out that the impact of defunding will vary. 'A larger farm in a different place has access to resources that our farmers just don't have access to,' Hutchinson said. Farmers from Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust are already starting with lower levels of federal support, and their capacity to replace those funds will likely be much lower. Meanwhile, farming organizations are trying to document what is happening as funding evaporates. The Hudson Valley Young Farmers Coalition, of which Lawson is a part, is collecting New York-based farmer testimonials to track the impact of cuts. The National Young Farmers Coalition is doing the same across the country.
On the ground, though, the Black Farming Fund members and other agricultural organizations are trying to secure funding and their futures. In mid-February, Farm School NYC launched an emergency fundraiser to meet its severe funding gap, support its scholarship fund, launch revamped courses and pay farmer facilitators. Thus far, it has raised $750.
The precarity of federal funding has the consortium's members looking elsewhere for funding. Farm School NYC has been assembling advocacy toolkits and helping facilitate contact with legislators. BFU-NYS recently launched a mobilization strategy that includes prioritizes funding from state and local government. Rouse noted that one of the non-profit's biggest supporters is New York State representative Khaleel Anderson, who chairs the state's food and farming nutrition policy task force. Through Anderson's support, BFU-NYS has had its own line item in the New York state budget for the past three years. Right now, Anderson is pushing for Black Farmers United to get increased support. BFU also wants to tap into New York City council discretionary dollars to fund local initiatives such as its Green Futures program and social responsibility grants from businesses that remain committed to diversity and inclusion.
Some advocates believe that now is the time for those with power and privilege to march on the streets and that QTBipoc, immigrant and food justice communities – often on the frontlines – should take a step back.
One of the first things longtime food justice advocate Karen Washington did was put out a call on her LinkedIn, asking her network to donate to cover the funding gap. Washington is co-founder of Orange county, New York's Rise & Root Farm.
'There are foundations, hedge funds, venture capital groups, and Wall Street executives who can write a check in an instant without losing a cent.' In an interview, she asked: 'Where are the people that voted for this? Where is the outrage?'
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‘The real issue is change': Edinburgh University's first Black philosophy professor on racism and reform
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For Tommy J Curry the question about Edinburgh University's institutional racism, or its debts around transatlantic slavery and scientific racism, can be captured by one simple fact: he is the first Black philosophy professor in its 440-year history. As the Louisiana-born academic who helped lead the university's self-critical inquiry into its extensive links to transatlantic slavery and the construction of racist theories of human biology, that sharply captures the challenge it faces. Not just that, Curry suspects he is the first Black academic in the UK to lead a university's investigation into its links to enslavement and empire. His goal is to guarantee he is far from the last Black professor. 'I'm a first-generation person. I grew up in poverty, grew up at the end of segregation,' he said. 'Why is that important to not be the first? Well, it's important because everybody has an 'in', and if there's nothing left after your 'in', you just become a symbol for somebody else's story. 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So roughly 1% of the people, PhDs, that were teaching faculty. 'Scotland is a free society. It claims it's a society that's free from racism and yet you have about the same percentage of Black people teaching here. So how does a free society that's free of racism produce the same kind of outcomes that a segregated, racist society produced in the United States?' Sign up to The Long Wave Nesrine Malik and Jason Okundaye deliver your weekly dose of Black life and culture from around the world after newsletter promotion That demonstrates a sequence, a chain of action and consequence which the university can now choose to break, he said. The newly published slavery and decolonisation review urges Edinburgh to fund a new centre for the study of racisms, colonialism and anti-Black violence and to prioritise the recruitment of Black and ethnically minoritised academics, researchers and students – partly funded by new scholarships – and ensure equal access to research funding. Frith points to the review team's decision to recruit paid Black and minority ethnic scholars and activists who specialise in colonialism, reparations policy and the repatriation of remains. Edinburgh has been a leading centre for reparations research for a decade, she said, since it held an international conference on reparations in 2015. The university, led by its principal, Peter Mathieson, made what Frith calls the 'really good decision' to set up the review after a 'collective groundswell' from staff and students to respond to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, and Glasgow University's groundbreaking report in 2018 on its slavery debt, as well as a controversy at Edinburgh in 2020 over the renaming of a university building named after the philosopher and alumnus David Hume, author of a 'notorious footnote' in 1753 claiming 'the Negroes' were 'naturally inferior'. 'I don't see that history as something that sits in the past with a closed door,' Frith adds. 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‘The real issue is change': Edinburgh University's first Black philosophy professor on racism and reform
‘The real issue is change': Edinburgh University's first Black philosophy professor on racism and reform

The Guardian

timea day ago

  • The Guardian

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For Tommy J Curry the question about Edinburgh University's institutional racism, or its debts around transatlantic slavery and scientific racism, can be captured by one simple fact: he is the first Black philosophy professor in its 440-year history. As the Louisiana-born academic who helped lead the university's self-critical inquiry into its extensive links to transatlantic slavery and the construction of racist theories of human biology, that sharply captures the challenge it faces. Not just that, Curry suspects he is the first Black academic in the UK to lead a university's investigation into its links to enslavement and empire. His goal is to guarantee he is far from the last Black professor. 'I'm a first-generation person. I grew up in poverty, grew up at the end of segregation,' he said. 'Why is that important to not be the first? Well, it's important because everybody has an 'in', and if there's nothing left after your 'in', you just become a symbol for somebody else's story. 'I'll be the subject of another report, but I won't have influence, I wouldn't have ushered in any of the people that look like me that the world said couldn't be.' The point is not to simply produce a report but to act, he said. 'The real fundamental issue is change. Not a symbolic apology, not a pay cheque. [How] do you create leagues of Black thinkers and clinicians and doctors and engineers and artists that fill the gap of what were lost by what white people engineered for centuries that deprived the world of Black human genius. That's why this report matters so much to me.' In turn, he added, Scotland could become better equipped to tackle the endemic problems of racial disparity in health outcomes, mortality, employment, housing, education. 'So when you think of it this way, what does reparations mean if it doesn't mean dealing with the consequences that were created by the very institutions you want to write the cheque?' His singular status in Edinburgh's philosophy department (which lists 12 tenured professors) also, he added, points to one of the most important findings of its investigation: the 'severe underrepresentation' of Black staff, the patchy recruitment of Black and ethnically minoritised students, and continuing staff and student experiences of racism. The decolonisation review, which was co-chaired by Dr Nicola Frith, an expert in reparations policy, found that less than 1% (150 out of 17,260) of the university's employees were Black – a figure that has been static for some years. A different picture emerges with other ethnic groups. The number of Asians – a category which includes Japanese, Chinese and south Asian people – reached 9% in 2022-23, up from 7% in 2018-19. Among the university's 49,430 students in 2022-23, 34% of its undergraduates were Asian – driven largely by growing numbers of Chinese students – with just 2% Black. Among postgraduates, 44% were Asian, 5% Black. The report says the increasing diversity in the university's population 'does not benefit Black staff and students' yet Edinburgh prides itself on being a 'global institution'. That means it should measure progress against the world's demographics too. 'While there is a dominant white racial majority in the UK, and especially in Scotland, the basis of comparison must not presume that small numbers of non-white racial and ethnic minorities in Scotland offer an appropriate baseline for comparison.' Scottish census data from 2021 puts the country's non-white minority ethnic population at 7.1%, but in Edinburgh that figure is just over 15% – nearly 77,800 people, 2.1% (10,881) of them Black. Across England and Wales, 18.3% of the population are from minority ethnic communities, 2.5% of them Black. 'So I ask this very seriously,' Curry continued. 'In the United States, before the end of Jim Crow segregation [in 1965], there was roughly 1.2% of Black scholars there. 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Frith points to the review team's decision to recruit paid Black and minority ethnic scholars and activists who specialise in colonialism, reparations policy and the repatriation of remains. Edinburgh has been a leading centre for reparations research for a decade, she said, since it held an international conference on reparations in 2015. The university, led by its principal, Peter Mathieson, made what Frith calls the 'really good decision' to set up the review after a 'collective groundswell' from staff and students to respond to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, and Glasgow University's groundbreaking report in 2018 on its slavery debt, as well as a controversy at Edinburgh in 2020 over the renaming of a university building named after the philosopher and alumnus David Hume, author of a 'notorious footnote' in 1753 claiming 'the Negroes' were 'naturally inferior'. 'I don't see that history as something that sits in the past with a closed door,' Frith adds. 'It is something that directly affects all of us today in very different and uneven ways, but it nonetheless does affect the shape of our society, our relations, everything.' Frith and Curry argue that if the university adopts their group's recommendations, the impact could be profound. 'There are very few things that stand beyond our lifetime,' said Curry. 'A centre, an institute, the creation of Black scholars in the UK around this issue of racism, dehumanisation and colonialism is something that I think will change the intellectual tenor and academic climate of the country. Nothing like it exists. 'So when we're looking at why it's important, it's because if the University of Edinburgh served as the pinnacle of the 17th, 18th and early 19th century for this work, why can't it serve as the same centre to undo it in the 21st century?'

Train derailment that killed three in Germany likely caused by landslide, say police
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time2 days ago

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