Copyright 2004 El Paso Times (El Paso, TX) All Rights Reserved

El Paso Times

February 26, 2004

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. 1F

Loans denied, Hispanic farmers say

Louie Gilot, El Paso Times

Many things can derail small farmers of the Lower Valley — droughts, hailstorms and pests.

But some local Hispanic farmers said they also have had to contend with discriminatory practices by the U.S. Department of Agriculture office that's in charge of helping them.

The El Paso farmers are part of a federal class-action lawsuit filed in the District of Columbia in 2000, alleging discrimination in the award of operating and disaster loans at the USDA's Farm Service Agency between 1981 and 2000. The suit is in the class certification stage.

"There has to be accountability so a Hispanic farmer has the same chance to get a loan as an Anglo farmer," said Stephen Hill, a lead lawyer on the suit with the Howrey Simon law firm in Washington.

The suit's attorneys visited with the five or six El Paso-area farmers named in the suit Wednesday in El Paso. A total of 110 plaintiffs from around the country are named in Garcia v. Veneman, and 20,000 farmers could benefit from a possible settlement, including about 200 in El Paso. The suit is named for Guadalupe L. Garcia Jr., a Las Cruces farmer, and USDA Secretary Ann Veneman.

USDA officials in Washington declined to comment on the pending suit. But they said that 10 percent of Farm Service Agency loans are earmarked each year for minority and women farmers and that the department created the Office of Minority and Socially Disadvantaged Farmers Assistance two years ago.

According to Census Bureau projections, the number of Hispanic farmers has increased by 50 percent between 1997 and 2002 to more than 50,000.

"Hispanics are going to be an integral part of agriculture's continued prosperity and we are committed to help," USDA spokesman Ed Loyd said.

But some El Paso farmers said the discrimination continues.

Among the practices that the suit alleges are refusals to help fill out loan applications or even to hand out loan applications to Hispanic farmers. Farmers also allege that the Farm Service Agency paid smaller loans than what Hispanic farmers requested and took so long to process loans to Hispanics that no money was left, or the money came after harvest.

Loans are crucial for farmers to cover the past year's debt, to buy equipment and other necessities and to expand their operations.

Delays in completing applications were particularly hurtful to Alfredo Alvarez, 61, of the 9700 block of Southside Road in El Paso. In 2001, the farmer asked the agency for an operational loan to plant Pima cotton, a rather profitable crop, but the loan took so long to process that it was too late to plant Pima. Alvarez settled for the less-profitable upland cotton, but because he had changed crops, his loan was rejected, Alvarez testified in a declaration for the suit signed in 2002.

Alvarez added that more delayed loans forced him to decrease his production and scale down his farming operation by hundreds of acres.

Alvarez wrote that he believes "the agency discriminated against me in processing my loan applications on the basis of my national origin," according to the declaration.

Pete Grijalva Jr., 54, president of the El Paso Hispanic Farmers Association, farmed until 1988 and testified about his situation to Congress in 2002. He said the agency failed to help him with disaster loans when hail destroyed his cotton crop in the 1980s.

"So you try to get another loan at the bank, but you still haven't paid the first one and you're getting in debt up to your you-know-what," he said Wednesday.

The farmers' complaints fell on deaf ears in the 1980s when the USDA shut down its civil rights enforcement program for more than 10 years, Hill said. In the late 1990s, Congress passed a law extending the statute of limitations for complaints under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, making the Garcia lawsuit and several others possible.

Black farmers filed a discrimination lawsuit against the USDA, Pigford v. Veneman, in 1999 and reached a settlement in 2003 of almost $650 million for its nearly 13,000 plaintiffs. Native American farmers have filed a similar class action lawsuit against the USDA, Keepseagle v. Veneman. That suit is still pending.