Farmers who have experienced discrimination from USDA in farm lending programs should get assistance sometime this summer, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said at a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing Wednesday.
In an exchange with Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., Vilsack also said 40,000 farmers had been helped by a separate provision in the Inflation Reduction Act to aid distressed borrowers. The IRA provided $3.1 billion for distressed borrowers in Section 22006 of the law and $2.2 billion for victims of discrimination in Section 22007.
“Last count, there are nearly 60,000 applications that have been received” for the Section 22007 assistance, Vilsack said. “So now the outside administrators have got to go through the process of evaluating those applications. Our hope is that we get the resources out the door sometime in the summer.”
The hearing, which was less partisan rancor than a recent appearance before the House Ag Committee, covered familiar ground for Vilsack.
He heard concerns about the cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, use of the Commodity Credit Corporation, firefighter pay, and the impact of California’s Proposition 12, which he has recently begun saying points up the need for Congress to craft a legislative solution to prevent all 50 states from passing their own laws defining which types of food products can or cannot be sold in their states.
He also defended the range of practices available for climate-smart funding under the IRA, telling Nebraska Republican Sen. Deb Fischer that her state has options in programs outside of the IRA to address water issues in her state.
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In an exchange with Warnock, he said Georgia, one of 13 states that has declined to participate in the summer EBT feeding program, was leaving $138 million on the table. “Then you have to figure out how it rolls around the economy,” he said. “So you're talking about probably close to half a billion dollars of economic activities lost.”
Vilsack received questions from some on the committee about foreign land ownership that provided some context for a long-running controversy that mostly has centered on fears of China buying up U.S. farmland.
Vilsack said that the law governing tracking of foreign farmland purchases relies on self-reporting and that “unless there is some kind of central database, which I don't think folks are really excited about, listing all of the real estate transactions that take place in this country, you've got an honor system,” he said.
He said Chinese interests own “one-tenth of 1%” of the amount of farmland owned by foreign investors. About 3.4% of U.S. farmland, which the latest Ag Census said totals about 880 million acres, is owned by foreign interests.
He said the foreign landholding issue is “easy to demagogue” and that his concerns about Chinese land ownership center on national security and the reaction of China, the biggest importer of U.S. ag products, to laws restricting the ability of its people to buy land in the U.S.
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