USDA's Equity Commission has more work to do even though it recently delivered its final recommendations to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack last month.
The commission, which has been extended for another year, intends to keep a focus on the issues it addresses in its report.
“Our work is not yet complete,” Equity Commission co-chair Ertharin Cousin told a celebratory crowd at USDA’s Whitten building Feb. 22.
According to a press release, USDA will be “leveraging Equity Commission members and their organizations in a series of regional equity convenings throughout the remainder of 2024. The regional equity convenings will be designed to feature the breadth of USDA’s equity work, while also having deep-dive discussions on priority issues identified by members for ongoing engagement.”
Cousin, a former United Nations World Food Program director and the founder and CEO of Food Systems for the Future, said it is “imperative” that the commission members get the word out that USDA is, in fact, “already performing the work to implement our recommendations.”
“We have the responsibility to keep going, to make it real,” she said.
Former USDA Deputy Secretary Jewel Bronaugh, who served for about a year as the commission's co-chair before leaving the department, said in an interview that Vilsack is “acutely aware of what he needs to do” to make the recommendations in the report a reality.
“What he does not want to happen is that this just be another report that goes on the shelf, and nothing changes,” said Bronaugh, now the president and CEO of the 1890s Universities Foundation.
Commission co-chair Arturo Rodriguez, president emeritus of United Farm Workers, told the crowd at USDA he was pleased with the way the report came out. I'm filled with hope and confidence that our seat at the table is secure, and the needs and concerns of farmworkers will be addressed,” he said. “I certainly have a much deeper appreciation and understanding the challenges faced by black farmers, tribal communities, and Asian-Americans and all of our rural communities.”
Jewel Bronaugh, 1890s Universities FoundationCommission member Ron Rainey, a professor and assistant vice president at the University of Arkansas, said the final report does a good job of laying out the historical inequities faced by historically underserved populations. The beginning of the report includes a “historical context” section that broadly sketches USDA’s long inability, since its founding in 1862 by Abraham Lincoln as the “People’s Department,” to benefit all of the country’s peoples.“Since the founding of USDA, historical exclusionary practices and policies have disproportionately impacted minority groups,” that section says. It notes, for instance, “irrefutable evidence that between 1910 and 1997 Black farmers lost nearly 90% of their valuable farmland.”
Referring to the groups affected by those exclusionary policies, Rainey said, “When those farmers read the report, hopefully they can see that their pain has been recognized. And they can see how those recommendations are going to address that type of pain that they had.”
Vilsack and other top officials have given time and attention to the commission’s work, Rainey said.
“I'll admit that early on, a question that I had in the back of my mind was, is this a ‘checking of the box’ exercise,” done more for political gain than to effect actual change?
“But throughout the commission process, I will say that I was impressed with the responsiveness that we as a commission received from USDA. If we were debating an issue and we said we would like to speak with someone who can explain that to us, whether it's a program or it's a policy, we were given broad access, pretty solid briefings, and felt like we had access to every level of USDA to get a good understanding of it,” he said.
Rainey also said his skepticism was allayed at an early meeting by “one of my heroes, Miss Shirley Sherrod.”
“As we went around kind of talking about our expectations, she challenged us all to show her that this was more than just an exercise to develop recommendations. And I echo her words,” he added.
Sherrod, who served on the commission, was forced out as Georgia's state Rural Development director in 2010 by Vilsack after a misleading video clip was publicized that appeared to show her denying help to a white farmer. Vilsack apologized and offered her another job, but she declined. Nevertheless, after Vilsack accepted the report, Sherrod said she and Vilsack had moved on long ago and she is proud to work with him. He singled her out for praise at the event, saying no one had done more than Sherrod to take “the blinders off my eyes.”
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The report includes 66 recommendations, about half of which were already presented in an interim report issued last year. They are presented in 10 different sections that address a wide range of issues, including, but not limited to, equity in the USDA workplace and in the delivery of USDA services, farmworkers, Farm Service Agency county committees, heirs’ property, food and nutrition programs, strengthening rural economies, loans, and customer service.
“I know it's difficult because many USDA programs are delivered at the local levels,” Rainey said. “But I think the office at the national level, they can set a tone to really heighten intentionality. And I'm hopeful that those messages will be echoed and carried out. Ultimately, we're hoping to change cultures. And we know that's a long-term venture.”
Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-TexasAt the USDA event, Vilsack said USDA has been working to advance equity even as the commission has been meeting over the last two years.
“We've appointed minority members to county committees across the United States to ensure that there is somebody in the room with a point of view that can recognize when equity has not occurred,” he said. The Civil Rights Office at the department has seen “significant increases in staff, significant improvements in technology, [and adopted] process improvements to speed up the process of justice, so that now complaints are being handled more quickly, and wrongs are being righted more effectively.”
There’s a role for Congress, though Rainey says recommendations for legislative action, including base acre modernization, may be more “aspirational.”
House Ag Committee member Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, said “USDA should be commended for how this report addresses equity. It reflects the fact that issues of inequity can arise in nearly every aspect of life, profoundly impacting the opportunities folks have access to.”
Among issues that could be addressed by Congress are heirs’ property — specifically, “fully funding and empowering community nonprofits and extension services to provide legal and mediation services to provide access for all farmers and ranchers to these programs,” Crockett said.
Another issue: Requiring landlord outreach at the Rural Housing Service.
“Without outreach, people are now having to travel sometimes more than 50 miles to find somewhere to redeem their RHS voucher because the landlords nearby often don’t even know about the program,” she said. “There is legislation in the House right now (that Rep. Crockett introduced) that would require this. But RHS is also able to take up this suggestion all on their own.”
“The people and the press must continue to hold USDA accountable for implementing these recommendations,” Crockett said. “Congress, too, must be held accountable. We must pass a farm bill, and it must carry out the work of implementing many of the long-overdue suggestions of the USDA Equity [Commission] report.”
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