Thomas Catenacci of the Washington Free Beacon details the latest bad idea from the Golden State.
California Democratic governor Gavin Newsom’s “agricultural equity” advisers are finalizing recommendations for the state to redistribute farmland to non-white Californians and Native American tribes through land transfers and financial assistance programs that exclusively benefit racial minorities.
For more than two years, the California Agricultural Land Equity Task Force—part of Newsom’s Office of Land Use and Climate Innovation—has crafted a set of policy recommendations to “equitably increase agricultural land access.” It will deliver a final report to Newsom and the California legislature cementing those recommendations by the end of the year.
The task force’s latest draft report, published ahead of the task force’s August meeting earlier this month, calls to deploy state resources to give non-white Californians a leg up in acquiring farmland, an effort it portrays as a form of reparations. The report says California should gift large amounts of state-owned lands to Native Americans, adopt indigenous knowledge practices for land management, and provide low-interest loans, downpayment assistance, and grants to fund land acquisition to black farmers.
Those and other policies, according to the task force, will help solve California’s “agricultural land equity crisis.” Land ownership statistics prove such discrimination exists, according to the report, which laments that “82% of privately held farmland in California is owned by producers who identify as white.”
“The wealth of the U.S., including that of its agriculture industry, has been built on stolen land and the forced labor of California Tribal Nations, enslaved African Americans, and other exploited communities, who have been systematically excluded from land ownership and wealth-building opportunities,” the report says. “Addressing these past and continuing harms requires active efforts to ensure that all people have secure and affordable access to viable land for the care and cultivation of food, fiber, medicine, and culturally valuable resources, free from systemic barriers and racial disparities.”
