Vol. 64/No.18 May 8, 2000

Farmers tour Chicago, speak about Cuba

BY BETSEY STONE

CHICAGO — In a three-day visit to Illinois, Eddie Slaughter, vice president of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association, talked with students, working people, and farmers about the stakes in the struggle of Black farmers to keep their land. He also spoke about his experiences as part of a delegation of farmers from the United States to Cuba this February.

Slaughter received a warm reception from talk-show host Cliff Kelly, and from those calling in, when he appeared on a popular Black radio show on WVON April 14. After he explained how the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has robbed Black farmers of their land through discrimination in making loans and collecting debts, several callers shared their own experiences about struggling to hold on to family farms.

Slaughter pointed out that the land owned by Black farmers has gone from 16 million acres in l920 to just under 3 million acres today. Describing the class-action lawsuit, Pigford vs. Glickman, against the USDA for discrimination, he emphasized that the $50,000 offered individual farmers who are Black in the court settlement was a paltry amount that cannot solve the problem of the immense debts they owe. "It's not the $50,000 we need, but the land," he said. "Until the USDA grants debt relief, one and a half million acres of land currently owned by Black farmers stands to be lost."

Slaughter pointed out that due to the agrarian land reform carried out by the revolution, Cuban farmers do not face the same kind of problems as small farmers in the United States. "They gave the land back to the poor, to the peasants, to the farmers. You don't have foreclosures in Cuba; you don't have the accelerated collection of debts; you don't have taxes on the land." Farmers are "held in high esteem in Cuba," he said.

Slaughter spoke at three different college campuses in the Chicago area. He gave a presentation that was part of the Seventh Annual African American Leadership Conference at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois; spoke to a class at Chicago State University; and at a meeting at DePaul University sponsored by the Activist Student Union. At all the presentations he urged support for the next national protest action being organized by the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association— a demonstration in Washington outside the United States Department of Agriculture on May 8.

He stressed that all family farmers have a stake in this struggle since all are being hit by falling commodity prices and government policies that favor the rich farmers.

At Northern Illinois University, he described the liberating feeling of being in Cuba, of being with fellow fighters who were farmers, of not having to deal for a while with police brutality and with racist institutions like the USDA. In answer to a question about racism in Cuba, he said, "Yes, some exists. But not the institutionalized racism like we see in this country." Racism does not exist like here "as a tool to keep us divided."

A high point of the visit was an open air meeting at the farm of the Basu family attended by farmers and other residents of Pembroke Township. The township is an overwhelmingly Black rural community about 60 miles south of Chicago.

Among those attending were members of the Pembroke Advocates for Truth, a group fighting to stop the construction of a prison that poses a threat to local farms. The Basus explained to Slaughter that the adjacent lot to their farm is where the prison is set to be built. The proximity to the farm puts their organic certification in jeopardy.

A protest action is projected at the time of the groundbreaking. Mark Anthony, one of the farmers present, explained that in his opinion the groundbreaking has been postponed "due to the fight we have been waging."

On WVON, when a speaker from Pembroke called, Slaughter tied together the fight against the prison and the fight of Black farmers for land. The growing incarceration of Blacks is part of the discrimination and the crisis of the system, he asserted. "We're not just talking about a crisis of Black farmers."

David Rosenfeld contributed to this article.

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