Farmers looking for justice

Farmers looking for justice

Dallas Morning News: Ten years after 15,000 black farmers reached a landmark $1 billion class-action settlement with the federal government, Hispanic farmers, many of them in South Texas, still wonder whether they’ll ever receive justice.

Federal officials readily admit that the Agriculture Department’s Farm Service Agency discriminated against Hispanic and black farmers for decades, delaying and denying their loan applications while granting assistance to white farmers. But ag officials and the Justice Department now seem more committed to outlasting the farmers than righting injustices.

The latest holdup began in the 1990s, after a federal judge gave black farmers the go-ahead to pursue a class-action lawsuit. Another judge, who heard essentially the same allegations of discrimination, denied class-action status to the Hispanic farmers.

The federal government settled with the black farmers soon after President Bill Clinton asked federal lawyers to do so. But armed with the second court ruling, agriculture and justice officials have insisted on negotiating individual settlements with as many as 82,000 Hispanic farmers. Not surprisingly, those cases have gone nowhere.

The history of this case warrants aggressive corrective action. In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration quietly shut the USDA’s civil rights division, leaving discrimination complaints uninvestigated for years. Eventually, the misbehavior became public, but not before thousands of Hispanics lost farms and livelihoods.

The history of this discrimination is despicable, and so is the current delay.