Of magical places and iron fists

Tom Philpott, a financial writer turned farmer (which is sort of the path I'm on, albeit at a much earlier stage), is always worth reading.

While he appears to have at least temporarily abandoned his great, cleverly named Bitter Greens Journal blog, which he describes as "a running critique of industrial agriculture, a clearinghouse for info on sustainable farming, and a working manifesto for a liberation politics based on food," his writing continues to appear in other venues.

He seems primarily to focus on contributions to Grist and Gristmill (here's a recent piece), but today he turns up in Counterpunch, with a heartbreaking, sharply reasoned look at the tragedy of Los Angeles' South Central Community Farm, the nation's largest community garden, which, it appears, is being done in by the double whammy of dubious backroom real estate deals and the "invisible fist of neoliberalism," which has come down hard on the (mostly Central American, all poor) plot holders. Taking land nobody wanted at the time, these 325 families have created what the L.A. Times allows is a "special, almost magical place." Of course the Times, its priorities always in place, doesn't allow itself to get carried away: "no magic is so strong that it erases a landowner's right to either his property or its fair value."

As Philpott explains, that "right" and "fair value" are not exactly clear cut.

Irony abounds here like vegetables in a well-tended garden plot. Most of the plot holders are immigrants from Mexico and Central America. A generation of neoliberal policies in Latin America has turned smallholder farming there into an economic disaster, sending legions of displaced farmers north in search of gainful employment. These immigrants-whose hard work for low pay has helped underwrite the U.S. inflation miracle, keeping interest rates low so consumers can, well, consume-find few opportunities to grow their own food here in El Norte. In this case, when they did gain access to kitchen plots, the invisible fist of neoliberalism swooped down again, powered as always by property's inalienable right.

Yet the ironies go deeper than double-displacement-deeper even than plunking a big-box warehouse, groaning with goods manufactured by low-wage workers in China, on top of a food source for low-wage Latino workers in the United States. To understand fully the brazenness of Horowitz's power play-and the feebleness of the Times' response to it-you have to sift through the details of how the developer gained title to the land.

Read the whole piece...

Link: South Central Farmers