Keeping Forests as Forests While Helping Disadvantaged Families

In the rural south, one of the primary and historic sources of rural African American wealth—land ownership—drains out through land loss, damaging the potential of communities to capture and regenerate wealth.  Within the context of a comprehensive system of landowner support, expanding and improving the practice of sustainable forestry can help plug the land leak by demonstrating the productive capacity of the land, creating new income for landowners, increasing land value, stabilizing land ownership, and slowing the conversion of working forests to development.   That’s the theory behind the Endowment’s newest project – “Sustainable Forestry and African American Land Retention.”

Ownership Losses Undermine Families
Black farmland ownership peaked in 1910 at 16 to 19 million acres.   By 2007, this number had dropped to 3.3 million acres.  In a very recent indication of the scale of ownership, the Center for Heirs Property Preservation in Charleston, SC mapped 41,000 acres of heir property in the rural counties surrounding them.  Heir property is land with unclear title and complex family ownership due to lack of wills, making it particularly vulnerable to loss.  It is believed that a large percentage of heir property landowners are African American.

Despite dramatic land loss across the rural south, farm and forest land continues to be an important source of African American family wealth, with a total value of $14.3 billion in 1999.  An estimated 43% of Black farmland owners have forestland totaling 1.2 million acres.   About 16% of Black-owned farmland is in forests with the average forestland holding being 43 acres.

Drivers of Change are Many
The causes of under-utilization and involuntary loss of rural African American land are numerous and complex. In addition to fragmented family ownership (heir property), financial pressure from development and consequent rising taxes, failure to maximize potential income from land due to lack of information, limited access to government programs, and lack of credit are contributing factors.

Moreover, support for African American forest owners is fragmented and difficult to access.  Historic discrimination and subsequent lack of trust have resulted in under-utilization of USDA Rural Development, Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), USDA Forest Service (USFS), and state extension forestry programs by African American landowners.  Additionally, nonprofits in the region that do provide support to African American landowners are often very under-resourced and, as a result, lack capacity.  Currently, USDA programs to address past deficiencies in government outreach to minority and limited resource landowners create a particular opportunity for nonprofit/government collaboration.

Best Hope Found in Collaboration
There is a long history of grassroots, nonprofit, and philanthropic involvement in the field of African American land retention and communities and practitioners have made much progress in understanding and addressing African American land loss. Through “Sustainable Forestry and African American Land Retention,” the Endowment seeks to learn from, leverage, and move forward the work that has been and is being done.