Leah Douglas

(Reuters) – The United States has lost approximately $326 billion of acreage to black farmers over the last century. That’s according to the first ever study of the actual value.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and minor farmers have had to contend with land loss as a contributing factor in the growing racial wealth disparity.

Professor Dania Francis of Economics at University of Massachusetts-Boston and the lead author of Sunday’s study in American Economic Association’s Papers and Proceedings journal, said that “Wealth and Land is one of the ways in this country you can grow opportunity for yourself and your family.”

Francis said, “When large groups of African Americans were denied this opportunity it speaks to intergenerational wealth gaps that opened up in some part due to that type of land loss.”

Study revealed that the land loss resulted from discriminatory USDA lending policies as well forced sales of co-owned land, known as heirs’ property.

Based on data from USDA Census of Agriculture, the study determined the compounded worth of the declining acres owned by African Americans in each of the 17 states that almost all Black farms are documented.

According to Dr. Darrick Hamilton (an economics professor at The New School who was also one of the authors of this study), “This is more than theoretical. It is empirical.” These are actual losses that actually occurred.

Experts claim that Black farmers had more than 16,000,000 acres of land in 1910. According to experts, this figure stood at 4.7 million acres or 0.5% of total farmland in 2017.

According to the authors of the study, $326 billion is an conservative figure. This could be because multiplier effects are not taken into account, such as whether Black farmers might have used their land for collateral in order to invest.

Biden’s administration attempt to give debt relief to farmers from color in the American Rescue Plan Act has been stalled by courts after it was criticized by white farmers as discriminatory. [L1N2SY2JW]