GND includes land repatriation/reparations

(Audrea, sw/editor@Verso, , 5-19)

Still, there is some cause for hope. Sustainable farmers, scattered throughout both urban and rural areas of the US, are already deploying permaculture methods of farming that, in some cases, can even help sequester carbon from the atmosphere. On her Soul Fire Farms in Albany, New York, Leah Penniman cultivates some of her crops on rocky slopes that Namibian mounding and Kenyan terracing farming techniques have made productive, but which industrial agribusiness would have considered unusable. Some 1,500 miles away in Minnesota, the indigenous environmental activist Winona LaDuke initiated a project in 1989 to recover reservation lands lost settlers, revive old traditions of land stewardship, and produce wild rice and other Ojibwe foods. Further west, in Washington state, migrant Mexican farmers who organized the Familias Unidas por la Justicia farmworkers union have launched a new farm cooperative, Cooperativa Tierra y Libertad, to grow organic berries and offer a more secure future for its worker-owners. There are others too, run by brown, black, and indigenous farmers drawn to sustainable food-growing methods both as a cultural inheritance — organic farming is a method developed across millennia, but first revived in the US by a black farmer, Dr George Washington Carver, in the early 1900s — and as a way to provide cheap, healthy food for their communities. Could these be, to borrow AOC’s words, the “resources” that the federal government needs to mobilize with investment? Some elements of such a Green New Deal might already be found, in limited, seedling form, within existing legislation and government programs. The federal Farm Bill’s 2501 program includes special funding, through land trusts, community colleges, tribal governments, and nonprofit organizations, to help farmers of color acquire, own, operate, and retain farms. Penniman suggests that farmers be paid, via the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and Conservation Reserve Program, for using methods that conserve the environment and sequester carbon. (And, on the flip side, industrial agriculture should be taxed for outsourcing the long-term effects of its pollution and ecological destruction onto the public). Yet these measures leave intact the economic and political structures that favor corporations and the wealthy over sustainable farmers, and will continue to be limited by one essential factor: land. Last spring, Penniman helped convene a gathering of the Northeast Farmers of Color Network, an informal alliance of about 150 black, Latinx, and Asian organic farmers. The animating question: “What are the biggest obstacles for being able to feed and sustain our communities, and maintain the businesses that support our families?” One answer emerged repeatedly: “access to land.” Long-term planning and construction projects are difficult for farmers who rent, and this includes investing time and money into implementing (and, in many cases, learning) sustainable farming methods. As long as people depend on water, air, food from the earth, and natural environmental processes to survive, these resources — and the land that holds them — should not be controlled by a small number of billionaires. A just, equitable Green New Deal would acknowledge that land is a major source of wealth and inequality, and work towards what activists call “land justice” — the access to land that farmers need to “build healthy, equitable food systems that provide jobs and keep the food dollar in the community,” as Eric Holt-Giménez, the executive director of think tank Food First, writes. It might do this by creating, as Penniman and the Northeast Farmers of Color have advocated in the past, a commission to “study reparations and propose a comprehensive redistribution of wealth and land.” Federal programs to buy back land are, while limited, not entirely without precedent. The Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations allocated $2 billion in 2009 to repurchase indigenous lands that had been “fractionated” into small, individually owned parcels, and returned to reservations and communal tribal ownership under the Cobell v. Salazar settlement. And in an interview, the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz noted that, despite its manifold problems and shortcomings, the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act — part of the original New Deal — did include funding to buy back similar lands and restore them to tribes. These steps would not reverse the historical processes that deprived black, brown, and indigenous communities of resources, power, and dignity for generations — the same ongoing processes that drive corporate resource extraction and created the climate crisis. But they would be steps toward rectifying historical wrongs. And climate chaos, spreading heat waves, deep freezes, droughts, floods, and fires throughout the continent will only further threaten land access for people long divested of it. USAID has stated that land tenure “will be instrumental in managing the increased population in migrant-receiving communities” — in other words, climate migration. Even the World Bank acknowledges that “secure land rights are essential to reduc[ing] disaster risk and build climate resilience.” Land rights allow communities to grow their own food, build their own housing, install their own solar panels, and create public places where local markets and social networks can be cultivated — resources that, when disaster strikes, can make the difference between perishing and bouncing back. Yet at the Northeast Farmers of Color gathering, the questions did not stop at the issue of land access. “When we have access to land, what are ways to hold land in common?” “There’ve been communities all over the world who, before they were impacted by capitalism and globalization, were operating in a similar fashion,” said brandon king of Cooperation Jackson, laying out their vision for an “eco-village” on a block of land they’ve acquired near downtown Jackson. The imagined eco-village would be a mixture of new and renovated homes, all manufactured by the industrial 3D-printing Fab Lab machines they’ve acquired; permaculture design and a farm; and solar panels for the community. “The eco-village is a way that we can show a different way of life and relating to the land, and to each other,” he said. “It’s those models that we want to affirm.”