ATHENS -- Systematic racial and economic disparities in the U.S. has resulted in a decline in the number of African-American farmers due to limited liquidity and failure to sell products at competitive prices compared to their white counterparts.

According to data released by McKinsey, there are only 1.4 percent of farmers identified as black or mixed race compared with about 14 percent percent 100 years ago. And these farmers represent less than 0.5 percent of total U.S. farm sales.

Cesar Escalante, a Professor at the University of Georgia specializing in Agricultural Finance and Immigration, pointed out that agricultural products produced by African American farmers are difficult to sale at more competitive price due to systematic discrimination.
Based on McKinsey's data, Cesar found that government and banks use the credit system to consider the issuance of loans. But many factors make it more difficult for black farmers to get high credit scores.

"Since minority farms operate smaller farms, less profitable farms, and may have problems in liquidity and leverage, then they're probably not going to score higher in the credit score models. So when they're rejected because of these objective credit scoring models, it will be difficult to establish whether they were rejected because they were discriminated against or were they rejected because their financial indicators did not really meet the hurdle," said Cesar.

Although African-American farmers are constantly protesting against the unfair treatment, it seems there has been little efforts to mitigate discriminatory policies and practices.

"In terms of [having] expectations of the government to do anything, it's going to be a slow process. And I hope I can see it in my lifetime," said farm owner Bobby Wilson.