Discrimination victims to receive $2B from USDA

By Jared Strong

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will pay up to $2 billion to tens of thousands of working and would-be farmers who say they were discriminated against when they applied for federal assistance, the South Carolina Daily Gazette reported.

“While this financial assistance is not compensation for anyone’s losses or pain endured, it is an acknowledgement,” U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Wednesday in a media call.

Created in 2022 through the Inflation Reduction Act, the Discrimination Financial Assistance Program will make the one-time payments. Most of them will go to farmers in southern states that have relatively high percentages of Black residents; Alabama and Mississippi will receive about half of the money.

In South Carolina, the average payment will be slightly less than $40,000 per person; 1,369 people applied for the payments.

More than 58,000 people reported to the USDA that they were discriminated against due to a number of personal or social characteristic, the Daily Gazette reported. The agriculture secretary could not say what the most common factor that led to the discrimination was.

Jared Strong reports for the South Carolina Daily Gazette news website.