Op-ed: Overthrowing the
Food System’s Plantation Paradigm
The struggle for
abolition remains urgent. As we seek justice for people incarcerated and
indentured in agriculture, there is hope in freeing ourselves to build
nourishing food systems.
BY ASHANTÉ REESE AND
RANDOLPH CARR
Commentary, FARMING,
Food Justice
Posted on: June 19, 2020
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Top photo: Parchman Penal Farm. Male prisoners hoeing in a field in Mississippi. (Public domain photo by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History)
“Down where we are, food
is used as a political weapon.”
– Fannie Lou Hamer
As calls for abolition,
defunding and disbanding police departments, and reallocating critical city
resources animate the American landscape, we are facing an imminent opportunity
to draw connections between people in prisons and our food system.
For some, “abolition”
conjures images of a past thought gone. For those folks, images of slave
patrols and plantations seem unrelated to the current wave of uprisings
following the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. But for others,
abolition is a relevant, timely, and necessary injunction. Abolition invites a
critical-historical awareness of unfreedom and a creative prescription toward
the possibilities of freedom.
The coronavirus pandemic
has re-cast our food workers—cashiers, delivery persons, and farmers—as
essential. What of those who labor on prison farms?
While prison labor
specifically and mass incarceration more generally have been debated over the
years, researchers have been slow to make either theoretical or empirical
claims that link incarceration and the food system, despite the United States’
history with using enslaved and incarcerated labor to produce food.
Abolitionist theory cites the plantation as both a geography and way of
thinking whose logic has remained consistent, despite its changing material
form. The prison is one of those forms.
Many historians have
written about the development and role of the convict lease system in
rebuilding the South after the Civil War. Companies and plantation owners
leased prisoners to build railroads and perform agricultural labor. In Texas,
for example, the convict lease system not only provided labor for companies and
planters but also helped the state strengthen itself financially. When the
convict lease system formally ended in 1910, the Texas penitentiary system
continued its investment in agriculture, purchasing former plantations in east
Texas and along the Gulf Coast. Some of those former plantations make up the
130,000 agricultural acres currently maintained and operated by the Texas
Department of Criminal Justice.
The coronavirus pandemic
has re-cast our food workers—as essential. What of those who labor on prison
farms?
On Texas prison farms in
2017, incarcerated men and women raised 30 crops that produced more than 11.7
million pounds of food; harvested 123.7 million pounds of cotton, grains, and
grasses; tended chickens that produced just under 5 million eggs; canned
297,143 cases of vegetables; and processed more than 22.7 million pounds of
meat. The state, in effect, operates its own miniature food system that feeds
people who are incarcerated there (the Texas Department of Criminal Justice
boasts about being “self-sufficient”) as well as commercial sales of food to
the public.
Prison labor is not
solely used to feed prison populations or to supply state agencies. In 2018,
the nonprofit food justice organization Food First published an article that
asked: Is Prison Labor the Future of Our Food System? The group detailed how
private companies have turned to prison labor to make up for the shortage of
farmworkers due to anti-immigration legislation. Across the U.S. 30,000
incarcerated people provide onions, watermelons, potatoes, and other produce for
private companies to sell for public consumption.
Food First’s question
does not have an inevitable answer. As a terrain of struggle, abolition is as
much about building the institutions, relationships, and worlds we want to live
in as it is about dismantling those we reject. And we are not building from
scratch: The seeds and fragments of a more just, community-controlled food
system that honors the healing potential of working the land are already
present. Abolitionist theory also makes connections between how power that is
concentrated in police forces and prisons flows into other parts of our lives
through channels such as the food system.
A contemporary
abolitionist practice must create the conditions for healthy communities. To
that end, the work of nourishing people and building just food systems is
necessary. Just as sure as we must end state violence in the form of police and
prisons, we also must deepen our capacity to meet the needs of people and build
anew. What we build cannot be yet another transformation of a system that
privileges and protects private property, exploits labor, or maintains
hierarchies of deservedness.
Where can we turn when
we want to see abolitionism in practice? We turn to the prison strikes and
uprisings that used food as a political weapon in the fight for more humane
conditions. We turn to incarcerated farmers who, even as they labor under
confinement, point to the revolutionary possibilities of farming itself,
particularly in the context of prisons, where idleness is a threat to
individual and communal well-being. We turn to the folks who built Black towns
to make freedom spaces and examples of community land trusts and cooperative
enterprises. We turn to food justice organizations with radical Black
leadership that use food to build infrastructure for maintaining Black life
rather than hastening Black death. In these examples, we see fragments and
building blocks that challenge exploitation and private property while also
overturning the centuries-old plantation paradigm of violence and control.
As we continue to uplift
abolitionist demands, those of us also committed to land and food work must
insist on building self-determining food economies and fully commit to
overturning the food system’s plantation paradigm. Indeed, in the world where
we defund and disband police departments, shutter prisons and penal farms, and
end hyper-surveillance, we must also consider what we want to build that is
essential? An abolitionist approach to food requires us to build community,
grow food, and nurture people. All this must happen alongside the dismantling
of plantation-prisons.
National Latino
Farmers & Ranchers Trade Association
1029 Vermont
Avenue, NW, Suite 601
Washington, DC
20005
Office: (202)
628-8833
Fax No.: (202)
393-1816
Email: latinofarmers@live.com
Twitter: @NLFRTA
Website: www.NLFRTA.org
