  |
| D-Town Farm in is a hub in an extensive community-based
effort to turn the local food system into an engine for local economic
development, owned and operated by those who are most adversely impacted
by the lack of fresh food access in Detroit's underserved
neighborhoods. |
Detroit: A Tale of Two... Farms?
Executive Director, Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy
A
recent article in The Wall Street Journal
celebrated the Hantz Farms project to establish a 10,000 acre private
farm in Detroit. The project hinges on a very large land deal offered by
financial services magnate John Hantz to buy up over 2,000 empty lots
from the city of Detroit. Hantz's ostensible objective is to establish
the world's largest urban mega-farm.
I say "ostensible" because despite futuristic artists' renderings of
Hantz Farms' urban greenhouses, presently John Hantz is actually growing
trees rather than food. The
project website
invites us to imagine "high-value trees... in even-spaced rows" on a
three-acre pilot site recently cleaned, cleared and planted to hardwood
saplings. These trees, it seems, are just a first step in establishing a
200 acre forest and eventually -- pending approval by the City Council
-- the full Hantz megafarm.
In the short run, the purchase by Hantz cleans things up, puts
foreclosed lots back on the tax rolls and relieves the city of
maintenance responsibilities. If the tree farm expands, it could provide
a few jobs. In the long run, however, Hantz hopes his farm will create
land scarcity in order to push up property values -- property that he will own a lot of.
The Hantz Farms project openly prioritizes creating wealth by
appreciating real estate rather than creating value through productive
activities. If successful, the urban mega-farm will clearly lead to an
impressive accumulation of private wealth on what was public land. It is
less clear what this will mean for the low-income residents of Detroit.
Despite two years of glowing national press coverage, not all is
going smoothly with the project. Under Michigan's Right to Farm Act, the
Hantz megafarm would pass from the jurisdiction of the city to that of
the state. Many in the city are reluctant to lose control over such a
big chunk of real estate. When friction on the issue developed between
the Administration, city offices and the public, the Hantz negotiations
moved quietly out of the public spotlight. But the wheels kept
turning...
In a June memo to the Detroit City Council, the City Planning Department
complained that:
It has come to our attention, due to inquiry from the media, and
communication from a representative from Hantz Farms that the
Administration is proposing to sell property to Hantz Farms or some
subsidiary for a project on the east side of Detroit. Our office has not
received any formal information from the Administration regarding such a
proposal; therefore, we do not know with certainty the scope of the
project or whether or not it complies with current zoning and/or other
City codes.
The potentially massive transfer of public assets to private
ownership (at a cleanup cost of $2 million to the city) has led many
residents to call the Hantz deal a "land grab."
Though the scale is unprecedented, does this real estate project
really have anything in common with the brutal, large-scale land
acquisitions
sweeping Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America?
Land grabs in far-off places occur when governments allow outside
investors to push subsistence farmers and pastoralists off massive
swathes of tropical farm and range land to establish mega-plantations of
palm oil or sugarcane for ethanol. Despite the hype, very few of these
projects actually grow any food. Often the land grab is simply about
investing in real estate. Researchers studying the global phenomena have
not yet found any benefits for local communities resulting from these
land grabs. On the contrary, uprooted from land and livelihoods, poor
rural people are forced into the option of last resort: migration.
Notwithstanding, from Goldman Sacks and the Carlyle Group to
university pension funds, holders of big money are anxious to put their
wealth into land, at least until the global recession blows over. Cheap
land, devalued by economic and post-industrial recessions, is literally
up for grabs. Once acquired, the easiest and most effective, low-cost
way for big financial dogs to quickly mark their newly-acquired
territory has been to plant trees -- trees require little maintenance
and if global carbon markets ever really kick in, could pay dividends.
As Susan Payne, CEO of Emergent Asset Management has
bluntly stated,
"In South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa the cost of agriland, arable,
good agriland that we're buying is one-seventh of the price of similar
land in Argentina, Brazil and America. That alone is an arbitrage
opportunity. We could be moronic and not grow anything and we think we
will make money over the next decade."
Whether the objective is to safeguard wealth, speculate on real
estate, accrue water rights, bet on carbon credits or actually plant
food or fuel crops, the point of a land grab is to leverage
financially-stressed governments in order to acquire large areas of
public land under a convenient global pretense (e.g., cooling the
planet, feeding the world or ending the world fuel crisis). This
supposedly benefits the planet by enriching few and impoverishing many.
Detroit's 2,000 city-owned lots (now on sale at $300 each), coupled with
a food security discourse, fits some of the land grab parameters.
But like most places around the world, there are people living in the
land of Detroit, and not all residents are happy with Hantz's plan --
which is probably why he has worked behind the scenes, avoiding
Detroit's Urban Ag Work Group, the City Planning Commission, and the
Detroit Food Policy Council. While some residents support the Hantz
forest, others -- like those working with D-town Farms, who are already
very busy growing and distributing food -- don't believe the hype. They
are opposing the Hantz deal on moral, political and economic grounds.
Malik Yakini of the
Detroit Black Food Security Network
noted that he was anxious to participate in more active opposition to
this land grab, and that given the Administration's disregard for the
work of the Urban Ag Work Group and the City Planning Commission, the
sale of the land to Hantz undermines real democracy.
These are strong words coming from one of Detroit's leading food
security advocates. When one looks at the trajectory of D-Town Farms and
the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, what appears as
indignant opposition is really a fundamentally different logic for
addressing the health, education and general welfare concerns of
Detroiters living in the underserved neighborhoods the city refers to as
blighted neighborhoods.
The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network is a coalition of
community groups that focus on urban agriculture, policy development and
co-operative buying. They have been farming in Detroit since 2006,
pioneered an 18-month effort to formulate a city-wide food policy
adopted by the City Council in 2008, and researched and proposed the
model for the current Detroit Food Policy Council. They have helped grow
an extensive network of gardens and buying clubs to address fresh food
access and employment challenges in Detroit's underserved neighborhoods.
Throughout, the Network held public meetings and worked extensively
with city leaders, local business, churches and neighborhood
organizations, as well with Wayne State and Michigan State University.
The seven acre D-Town Farm is a hub in an extensive community-based
effort to turn the local food system into an engine for local economic
development, owned and operated by those who are most adversely impacted
by the lack of fresh food access in Detroit's underserved
neighborhoods.
But recognizing that Hantz Farms follows a speculative and private
real estate logic and seeks to concentrate wealth, while D-Town Farms
follows a community livelihoods logic that seeks an equitable
distribution of opportunities and resources, still barely touches the
surface of the deep differences in demography, culture, socio-economic
status and political orientation of the two urban farming projects.
At the center of this tale of two farms, lies a contentious global
question just beginning to resurface in the United States these days:
the land question.
Land -- rural or urban -- is more than just land; it is the space
where social, economic and community decisions are made, and it is the
place of neighborhood, culture and livelihoods. It is home. Therefore,
it is more than just a "commodity." While John Hantz's stated objective
is to produce scarcity of the land as a commodity, residents living in
the lower-income homes of post-industrial Detroit deal daily with
scarcity of health, education and basic public services to which they
are entitled. The transformation of these public goods into private
"commodities," coupled with their scarcity has not resulted in any
improvement for residents. Market demand and human needs are not the
same, and one does not necessarily address the other. Driving up the
price of land in underserved neighborhoods may well put the city on the
road to gentrification, but it won't help solve the challenges facing
the majority of Detroit's citizens.
There are many notable, socially and economically-integrated projects
in Detroit that are already improving livelihoods, diet and incomes
through urban farming. It is difficult to see how these can flourish in
the shadow of a mega-project designed to price low-income people out of
their own neighborhoods. While private sector initiatives need to be a
part of any economic development strategy, unless the City's democratic
public institutions can find positive ways to address Detroit's land
question, it runs the risk of reproducing a classic land grab -- with
all its disastrous consequences.
