Thursday, October 17 "Farmers in Suits

Learning Targets:
 I can determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings. Analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning, tone, and mood, including words with multiple meanings. Analyze how an author uses and refines the meaning of technical or key term(s) over the course of a text.
I can analyze how authors employ point of view, perspective, and purpose, to shape explicit and implicit messages.
I can use precise language, content-specific vocabulary and literary techniques to express the appropriate complexity of the topic.
I can use appropriate and varied transitions, as well as varied syntax, to make critical connections, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships among complex ideas and concepts.
 I can provide a concluding statement or section that explains the significance of the argument presented.
 I can maintain a style and tone appropriate to the writing task.

Coming up: "This Land Was Our Land" vocabulary 2 quiz on Tuesday, October 22. (class handout / copy below)
In class: Farmers in Suits part V.
            class handout / copy below)
Take out your notebooks. Write a correct MLA heading
   The title is "Farmers in Suits"

Respond to the following questions; in order to receive credit, you MUST weave in text, using quotation marks to deliniate what was used from the reading.

1. Based upon paragraph one, weave in text that explains why the "alluvial plain" of the Delta is a "global breadbasket".

2. At this point in time, who are the "real power brokers in the Delta." 

3. Why have "major funds...broaden their search for hedges against inflation?"

4. For whom was the pension companies originally set up for AND what reputation have they cultivated. Write this response as one sentence.

5. How was the grileiro Euclides de Carli able to invest in land in the Delta?

6. How does TIAA spokesperson defend their acquistion of Delta lands? 

7. Look at the chart below and answer the following:
 Figure 1. aWhat has been the trajectory of acreage owned by black farmers from 1980 to 2010?
Figure 1 b. How many black farmers are there in the Delta now?

“This Land is Our Land” by Vann R. Newkirk

V. Farmers in Suits

but land is never really lost, not in America. Twelve million acres of farmland in a country that has become a global breadbasket carries immense value, and the dispossessed land in the Delta is some of the most productive in America. The soil on the alluvial plain is rich. The region is warm and wet. Much of the land is perfect for industrialized agriculture.

Some white landowners, like Norman Weathersby, themselves the beneficiaries of government-funded dispossession, left land to their children. Some sold off to their peers, and others saw their land gobbled up by even larger white-owned farms. Nowadays, as fewer and fewer of the children of aging white landowners want to continue farming, more land has wound up in the hands of trusts and investors. Over the past 20 years, the real power brokers in the Delta are less likely to be good ol’ boys and more likely to be suited venture capitalists, hedge-fund managers, and agribusiness consultants who run farms with the cold precision of giant circuit boards.

One new addition to the mix is pension funds. Previously, farmland had never been a choice asset class for large-scale investing. In 1981, what was then called the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) released a report exploring a proposal by a firm seeking pension-investment opportunities in farmland. The report essentially laughed off the prospect. The authors found that only about one dollar of every $4,429 in retirement funds was invested in farmland.

Grain bins on Scott-family land, in Drew, once used for rice and now for soybeans. The Scott family’s farms reflect a larger economic pattern in the Mississippi Delta: the shift away from cotton, once predominant, toward other crops. (Zora J. Murff)

But commodity prices increased, and land values rose. In 2008, a weakened dollar forced major funds to broaden their search for hedges against inflation. “The market in agricultural land in the U.S. is currently experiencing a boom,” an industry analyst, Tom Vulcan, wrote that year. He took note of the recent entry of TIAA-CREF, which had “spent some $340 million on farmland across seven states.” TIAA, as the company is now called, would soon become the biggest pension-fund player in the agricultural real-estate game across the globe. In 2010, TIAA bought a controlling interest in Westchester Group, a major agricultural-asset manager. In 2014, it bought Nuveen, another large asset-management firm. In 2015, with Nuveen directing its overall investment strategy and Westchester and other smaller subsidiaries operating as purchasers and managers, TIAA raised $3 billion for a new global farmland-investment partnership. By the close of 2016, Nuveen’s management portfolio included nearly 2 million acres of farmland, worth close to $6 billion.

Investment in farmland has proved troublesome for TIAA in Mississippi and elsewhere. TIAA is a pension company originally set up for teachers and professors and people in the nonprofit world. It has cultivated a reputation for social responsibility: promoting environmental sustainability and respecting land rights, labor rights, and resource rights. TIAA has endorsed the United Nations–affiliated Principles for Responsible Investment, which include special provisions for investment in farmland, including specific guidelines with regard to sustainability, leasing practices, and establishing the provenance of tracts of land.

Each black farmer who left the region represented a tiny withdrawal from one side of a cosmic balance sheet and a deposit on the other side.

The company has faced pushback for its move into agriculture. In 2015, the international nonprofit Grain, which advocates for local control of farmland by small farmers, released the results of an investigation accusing TIAA’s farmland-investment arm of skirting laws limiting foreign land acquisition in its purchase of more than half a million acres in Brazil. The report found that TIAA had violated multiple UN guidelines in creating a joint venture with a Brazilian firm to invest in farmland without transparency. The Grain report alleges that when Brazil tightened laws designed to restrict foreign investment, TIAA purchased 49 percent of a Brazilian company that then acted as its proxy. According to The New York Times, TIAA and its subsidiaries also appear to have acquired land titles from Euclides de Carli, a businessman often described in Brazil as a big-time grileiro—a member of a class of landlords and land grabbers who use a mix of legitimate means, fraud, and violence to force small farmers off their land. In response to criticism of TIAA’s Brazil portfolio, Jose Minaya, then the head of private-markets asset management at TIAA, told WNYC’s The Takeaway: “We believe and know that we are in compliance with the law, and we are transparent about what we do in Brazil. From a title perspective, our standards are very focused around not displacing individuals or indigenous people, respecting land rights as well as human rights … In every property that we have acquired, we don’t just do due diligence on that property. We do due diligence on the sellers, whether it’s an individual or whether it’s an entity.”

TIAA’s land dealings have faced scrutiny in the United States as well. In 2012, the National Family Farm Coalition found that the entry into agriculture of deep-pocketed institutional investors—TIAA being an example—had made it pretty much impossible for smaller farmers to compete. Institutional investment has removed millions of acres from farmers’ hands, more or less permanently. “Pension funds not only have the power to outbid smaller, local farmers, they also have the long-term goal of retaining farmland for generations,” the report noted.

Asked about TIAA’s record, a spokesperson for Nuveen maintained that the company has built its Delta portfolio following ethical-investment guidelines: “We have a long history of investing responsibly in farmland, in keeping with our corporate values and the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). As a long-term owner, we bring capital, professional expertise, and sustainable farming practices to each farm we own, and we are always looking to partner with expansion-minded tenants who will embrace that approach and act as good stewards of the land.” The company did not comment on the history of any individual tract in its Delta portfolio.

But even assuming that every acre under management by big corporate interests in the Delta has been acquired by way of ethical-investment principles, the nature of the mid-century dispossession and its multiple layers of legitimation raise the question of whether responsible investment in farmland there is even possible. As a people and a class, black farmers were plainly targets, but the deed histories of tax sales and foreclosures don’t reveal whether individual debtors were moved off the land because of discrimination and its legal tools.

In addition, land records are spotty in rural areas, especially records from the 1950s and ’60s, and in some cases it’s unclear exactly which records the investors used to meet internal requirements. According to Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau, a campaigner and organizer at ActionAid, an anti-poverty and food-justice nonprofit, “It’s been a struggle to get this information.” The organization has tried to follow the trails of deeds and has asked TIAA—which manages ActionAid’s own pension plan—for an analysis of the provenance of its Delta portfolio. Such an analysis has not been provided.

What we do know is that, whatever the specific lineage of each acre, Wall Street investors have found a lucrative new asset class whose origins lie in part in mass dispossession. We know that the vast majority of black farmland in the country is no longer in black hands, and that black farmers have suffered far more hardships than white farmers have. The historian Debra A. Reid points out that “between 1920 and 1997, the number of African Americans who farmed decreased by 98 percent, while white Americans who farmed declined by 66 percent.” Referring to the cases studied in their 2001 investigation, Dolores Barclay and Todd Lewan of the Associated Press observed that virtually all of the property lost by black farmers “is owned by whites or corporations.” The foundation of these portfolios was a system of plantations whose owners created the agrigovernment system and absorbed thousands of small black-owned farms into ever larger white-owned farms. America has its own grileiros, and they stand on land that was once someone else’s.

“This Land Was Our Land”  vocabulary 2  quiz on Tuesday, October 22

1.     de facto (adjective)- actual, real

2.     anonymity (noun)-lack of outstanding, individual, or unusual features; impersonality.

3.     attrition (noun)- the action or process of gradually reducing the strength or effectiveness of someone or something through sustained attack or pressure.

4.     sprawling (adjective)- spreading out over a large area in an untidy or irregular way.

5.     to audit (verb)- an official inspection of an individual's or organization's accounts, typically by an independent body.

6.     to default -.failure to fulfill an obligation, especially to repay a loan or appear in a court of law.

7.     retaliation- (noun)- the action of returning a military attack; counterattack.

8.     demarcation (noun) - the action of fixing the boundary or limits of something.

9.     to plummet- (verb)- fall or drop straight down at high speed.

10.to consolidate- (verb)- make (something) physically stronger or more solid or combine (a number of things) into a single more effective or coherent whole.