A 2013 University of California, Berkeley study, for example, found that across the United States, Blacks were 52% more likely, Asian Americans 32% more likely, and Latinos/as 21% more likely to live in conditions with increased heat related risk as compared to whites. Furthermore, low-income people and people of color are also less likely to have air conditioning. In the Los Angeles-Long Beach Metropolitan Area, for example, approximately twice as many Blacks do not have access to air conditioning compared to the general population. The cumulative impact of such circumstances is that Blacks in Los Angeles are twice as likely to die from a heat wave as other residents. Significantly, Blacks and other communities of color are also less likely to own cars to escape extreme weather events: nationally, 19% of Blacks reside in households without a single car, compared to 13.7% of Latinos/as and 4.6% of whites. Furthermore, climate change will lead to higher prices for energy, food and water, exacerbating the fact that low-income communities and communities of color already spend a greater portion of their income on basic necessities. Households in the lowest income bracket use more than twice the proportion of their total expenditures on electricity, and twice the proportion of their total expenditures on food, than do those households in the highest income bracket. Finally, due to climate change, low-income communities and communities of color will have fewer or shifting job opportunities. Low-income people of color hold the majority of jobs in sectors that will be significantly affected by climate change, such as agriculture and tourism.
In California, as of 2014, for example, there were 739,000 agriculture laborers, 49.2% of whom were Latinos/ as. Workers in these industries, growing benches particularly agricultural laborers, would be the first to lose their jobs in the event of an economic downturn due to climatic troubles. Additionally, people of color already own the most marginal farmland and benefit the least from support programs, thus leaving certain producers themselves at greater risk due to climate change. Corporations, furthermore, stand to benefit by way of the impacts of climate change and a Farm Bill that serves corporate interests. In the 2014 Farm Bill, the crop insurance program expanded to cover specialty crops and account for the higher value of organics. Due to extreme weather, however, the program’s costs have grown even without changes to the Farm Bill. After the 2012 drought, for example, the Federal Crop Insurance Program paid out $17.3 billion in losses, the highest ever, breaking the earlier record set in 2011, yet taxpayers covered nearly 75% of the payouts, minimizing any cost to crop insurance corporations. The public thus subsidizes not only the destructive type of agriculture but also the insurance payouts themselves caused in part by such destructive methods—a resilient arrangement that leaves corporations benefitting the most.Corporate Consolidation and Control: Corporate consolidation and control have become central features of the US food system, and the Farm Bill in particular. As of 2014, large-scale family-owned and non-family-owned operations account for 49.7% of the total value of production despite making up only 4.7% of all US farms. As of 2013, only 12 companies account for almost 53% of ethanol production capacity and own 38% of all ethanol production plants. As of 2007, four corporations own 85% of the soybean processing industry, 82% of the beef packing industry, 63% of the pork packing industry, and manufacture about 50% of the milk. Only four corporations control 53% of US grocery retail, and roughly 500 companies control 70% of food choice globally.
Food System Worker Disparity: Racial and economic inequity is a central feature of the industrial and corporate-controlled food system. At every level of the food chain, for example, from food production to food service, workers of color typically make less than white workers. On average, white food workers earn $25,024 a year while workers of color make $19,349 a year.Significantly, women of color in particular suffer the most, earning almost half of what white male workers earn. In some contexts, a majority of farm workers who receive “piece-rate” earnings frequently earn far less than minimum wage—an exploitative practice deeply tied to immigration policy. For example, as of 2014, twice as many restaurant workers were food insecure compared to the overall US population; as of 2011, in Fresno County, California, 45% of farmworkers were food insecure, and in the state of Georgia, 63% of migrant farmworkers were food insecure. Beyond wages, few people of color hold management positions in the food system, with white people holding almost three out of every four managerial positions in the food system. As of 2012, 11.8% of executive and senior level officials and managers, and 21.0% of all first- and mid-level officials and managers in 2012 were people of color. One result of this disparity is that non-white food system workers experience greater food insecurity.Food Equity and Nutrition: Food insecurity in the US continues unabated, affecting low-income communities and communities of color in particular. As of 2013, 14.3% of US households—17.5 million households, roughly 50 million persons—were food insecure. The report also found that the rates of food insecurity were substantially higher than the national average for Black and Latino/a households, households with incomes near or below the federal poverty line, and households with children headed by single women or single men. Within this social, political, and economic climate, recent cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program and other meal support programs continue to disproportionately hurt communities of color, as they are frequently over represented in the lowest-paying sectors of the labor market. Land Access: In 1920, 14% of all US farmers were Black . By 1997, fewer than 20,000 US farmers were Black, and they owned only about 2 million acres. While white farmers were losing their farms during these decades as well, the rate that Black farmers lost their land has been estimated at two and a half to five times the rate of white-owned farm loss. Furthermore, between 1920 and 1997, the number of US farms operated by Blacks dropped 98%, while the number of US farms operated by whites dropped 65.8%. Although in 1982 the US Commission on Civil Rights concluded that the USDA was the primary reason Black farmers continued to lose their land at such astonishing rates. In 1983 President Reagan eliminated the division of the USDA that handled civil rights complaints. The USDA Office of Civil Rights would not re-open until 1996 during the Clinton Administration. The increasing influence of corporations inside and outside the food system since the early 1980s exacerbated such trends for communities of color, and marked the complex ties between the federal government and corporate interests. Farm Labor and Immigration Policy: The Farm Bill itself does not deal directly with immigration. However, the combination of an immigration system easily exploited by employers, and workers’ low income, limited formal education, limited command of the English language, and undocumented status, gives such farm laborers little opportunity for recourse within—or options outside of—the unjust working conditions that the Farm Bill has helped make possible. For example, as of 2009, 78% of all farmworkers were foreign born; 70% said they could not speak English “at all,” or could only speak “a little”; the median level of completed education was sixth grade; and 42% of farmworkers surveyed were migrants, a third of whom having traveled between the United States and another country, primarily Mexico.
Significantly, many agricultural workers fear that challenging the illegal and unfair practices of their employers will result in further abuses, loss of their job, and, ultimately, deportation. Worse yet, bud drying system few attorneys are available to help poor agricultural workers, and federal legal aid programs are prohibited from representing undocumented immigrants. Ultimately, corporate control of the food system secures and exacerbates the unjust treatment of the predominately non-white and migrant agricultural workforce of the United States. Climate Change: In the United States, the relationship between disparity in exposures to environmental hazards and socio-economic status has been widely documented. As a major contributor to global climate change and the racialized distribution of its impacts, conventional agricultural production practices, in particular, have been instrumental toward this end. In 2013, for example, the US Environmental Protection Agency reported that greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture accounted for approximately 9% of total US greenhouse gas emissions—an increase of approximately 17% since 1990. Low-income communities and communities of color in the United States experience the brunt of the effects of climate change than other Americans: they breathe more polluted air, suffer more during extreme weather events, and have fewer means to escape such extreme weather events. Rising energy, food, and water costs also disproportionately effect low-income communities and communities of color, as such communities already spend a greater portion of their income on basic necessities than white communities. Finally, low-income communities and communities of color hold the majority of jobs in sectors that will be significantly affected by climate change, such as agriculture and tourism. Workers in these industries would be the first to lose their jobs in the event of an economic downturn due to climatic troubles. Significantly, this report found a number of structural barriers to addressing these racial/ethnic, gender, and economic inequities. Part I found that the Farm Bill—from its inception in 1933 to the Farm Bills of the 1980s onward— is defined by the long term shift from the subsidization of production and consumption to the subsidization of agribusiness itself. In this light, low-income communities and communities of color have been structurally positioned on the losing side of such shifts, and of US food and agriculture policy more broadly. They have also been given few options for recourse, given the ways in which the Farm Bill has been designed and re-designed to be insulated from democratic influence, particularly by way of countless layers of committees. Part II found that, despite the benefits of joint SNAP and Unemployment Insurance for low-income communities and communities of color, such of the benefits of both during the recession precipitated by the 2007–2008 financial crisis, supporting public nutrition assistance programs and fighting poverty and racial/ethnic inequality, are antithetical. Specifically, while such public assistance programs do indeed support, in some ways, the most marginalized communities, they ultimately maintain structural inequity by way of the major profits that corporations such as Walmart and other large retailers reap by distributing such benefits. These corporations are the same ones that funnel profits back to their corporate headquarters, outside their respective retail sites, and that force low wages and poor working conditions onto workers at all levels of the food system. Finally, Part III and Part IV found that supporting the inclusion of producers of color into current payment schemes and fighting poverty and racial/ethnic inequity are also antithetical, despite recent gains in terms of USDA Civil Rights settlements and slowly increasing participation in such programs by such producers. Specifically, while such disparities may be addressed, in part, by way of more representative Farm Service Agency committees—or by better outreach and assistance such payment programs, and their successor, crop insurance programs—ultimately they maintain structural inequity. They do so, for example, by re-entrenching existing property regimes that consistently push producers, be they of any racial/ethnic background, to cut costs where possible. Specifically, while these disparities may be addressed, in part, by way of more representative Farm Service Agency committees—or by better outreach and assistance— such payment programs, and their successor, crop insurance programs, they ultimately maintain structural inequity. Furthermore, such property regimes set the stage for corporations to fare best, and to grow in size, profit, and influence by way of the multiple mechanisms outlined in both Part III and Part IV. These short term policy interventions must be aligned with the long term strategy of challenging the structural and racialized barriers to a fair and sustainable food system, and thus the existing social, political, and economic frameworks that make such barriers possible. That is because structural change must arguably begin with the tools that are available at the moment, in this case the US Farm Bill, in order to address the most immediate needs for some. Yet, history has shown that such tools can only address the needs of some.