The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon June 30th, 2009

Reader Randy sent me this today, and it just makes me happy to see the boom in urban agriculture:

 ‘Both Allen and Myers agree that the boom in urban farming for African-Americans is born out of necessity and not just echoing traditions.

“Minority people are affected by poor food, more than any other groups,” and many inner cities lack access to quality fruits and vegetables, Allen says. “Our food system is broken.”

“When you’re poor, when you don’t have access to resources, you have to create your own,” says Myers. “So this is a way for people of African descent to use their creativity to grow their own food.”

Many poorer communities don’t have full-scale grocery stores. Allen charges that companies have red-lined those areas and won’t build stores there.

So community activists like Myers have taken up the fight.

“[Starting] community gardens in local communities, specifically in urban areas, is important, so you create your own food security network,” says Myers. “You’re not relying on large grocery stores to provide food for everyone because if those grocery stores have problems, your access to food is done.”‘

The most important places to grow food have always been the places where people already are, and where good food is already needed.  Urban food deserts and rural ones both  need to build their agricultural infrastructure - and quickly, because conventional safety nets are already showing signs of fraying.  The good news is that nobody has to tell ordinary poor people they are screwed if they don’t take care of themselves - they’ve been doing that a long, long time.

African American farmers have suffered disproportionately under industrial agriculture - in the last 30 years, 35% of white American farmers have lost their land, while 80% of black American farmers have.  The average white American farmer is farming almost half again as much land as he was in 1970.  The average black American farmer is farming 1/5th as much land as he was in 1970.  Meanwhile American black farmers are involved in an ongoing lawsuit against the USDA, demonstrating that that agency helped drive thousands of black farmers out of business by denying them the same loans they were granting to white farmers.  The settlement numbers will probably end up in the billions.

African American people have suffered disproportionately from industrial food as well - obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure are more prevalent in black communities, as is salt sensitivity, driving up the health costs in both personal sufffering and material expense.  Poor urban neighborhoods half 1/5 the square footage of grocery store space in many areas, and most of the food is in bodegas and convenience stores, whose higher prices strain budgets. 

We need more black farmers, and better food in black communities.   Since the average age of African-American farmers is even older than the average age of American white farmers (63 vs 59), and because their parents and grandparents so overwhelmingly lost their land, the next generation of young farmers is going to come out of the cities and the city gardens.  Not only is it desperately important that all urban neighborhoods produce as much food as possible, it is even more urgent that we begin using those neighborhoods to train up farmers in the way that they should go - using smaller plots of land, intensive methods and low cost, low input organic techniques. 

The good news is that this is happening - that the shift in food systems isn’t an elite revolution, as sometimes is suggested.  Gardening has a long tradition in African-American communities - traditions that clearly aren’t that hard to reignite.  In World War II, African-American families dominated the Victory Garden movement - while white affluent families were the ones in the pictures, in Dallas, 90 percent of black families had a Victory Garden, while only 40 percen of white ones did. 

I’m doing a lot of radio interviews lately (I’ll be on NPR in Chicago this afternoon), and a little bit of my schtick is this - one estimate suggests that in just the last two years we’ve added *8 MILLION* new gardens - virtually all of them food producing.  That’s in just two years!  We’ve only got 92 million to go - that means we’re practically halfway there.  That line always gets a laugh, but I’m not joking - it isn’t just like a Revolution in agriculture, it is a revolution in agriculture - we’re having it now.

Sharon

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