Food Justice | Acequia Institute Letter on South Central Farm

Moderator’s
Note: We are posting a letter
prepared by Devon G. Peña on behalf of The Acequia Institute and submitted to
the Mayor of Los Angeles, City Council members, and Planning Department members.
The letter objects to the proposed construction of four industrial buildings
with massive semi-tractor trailer traffic and untold added environmental risks
to the South Central neighborhood surrounding the site at 41^st and
Alameda.

Food justice organization calls for
exploration of green alternatives

INDUSTRIAL LAND USES = ENVIRONMENTAL
RACISM

July 17, 2014

The Hon. Eric Garcetti, Mayor

Members of the Los Angeles City Council

Members of the Los Angeles Planning Commission

Re:      Case
No. ENV-2012-920-EIR, AA-2012-919, DIR-2013-887-SPR/ Proposed

Construction of Four
Industrial Buildings

Submitted via email: Srimal Hewawitharana at srimal.hewawitharana@lacity.org

Dear Mayor, Council Members, and Planning Commission
Members:

This marks the fourth time I am asked to offer
science-based perspectives and independent third-party evaluation of
development plans for the currently
vacated site of the world-famous and path-defining urban farm known as
South Central Farm. This invaluable green space is located in the heart of an
overly industrialized section of the Alameda Corridor that dissects the mostly
Latina/o and African American communities residing in this area of South Los
Angeles.

This area is in demographic transition with a growing
number of Mexican-origin families including many with ancient Mesoamerican
(indigenous) roots. For e.g., there are an estimated half million Zapotecas
living and working across the LA Basin; this Mesoamerican Diaspora is a primary
and growing constituency behind the unfolding grassroots urbanism in LA. It is
a social force with tremendous productive and creative powers. Studies,
summarized by the Dean of LA Urban Studies, Mike
Davis, indicate that Mesoamericans – which by the way are also well represented
in the ranks of South Central Farmers – are net contributors to positive
economic, cultural, and social benefits. For decades, environmental justice
scholars – myself included (see Peña
2011) – have been demonstrating how social and ecological capital are often
excluded from the cost-benefit metrics used by most EIRs and EISs. The type of
reductionism most planning departments are guilty of fixates on economic values to the exclusion of all
other measures.

Many of you are familiar with my credentials and
professional reputation as a research scientist, widely published scholar,
philanthropist, and farmer (see attached CV). Allow me to explain the work of The
Acequia Institute a bit more. The Institute was established in 2006 with a
generous endowment gift from our Father, a Laredo-born angeleno by the name of Alfonso C. Peña who made his mark across
Hollywood and East LA through Spanish language mass media (both radio and also
TV at KMEX). Mr. Peña always valued education as a road to equality and justice
and he especially thought that environmental education was important to the
creation of a better world.

The Institute’s research, education, and grant making
activities are focused on supporting environmental education in the fields of
agroecology, ethnobotany, and ethnomedicine for public health through the
rejuvenation of local food systems and heritage cuisines. We accomplish this
through fellowships for graduate students, tuition scholarships for the youth
of traditional acequia farm families, and a variety of direct-to-producer
grants and a focus on women-led food sovereignty projects.

The Institute’s headquarters are located on 200+
acres on two farms in south central Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The principal lands
are irrigated by the San Luis Peoples Ditch (constructed in 1852), which is the oldest adjudicated water
right in what is now the State of Colorado. From this location, the Institute
hosts an annual Acequia Agroecology and Permaculture Field School in
collaboration with local Centennial School District staff, elder mentors who
are experts in the fields, and students from the University of Washington
Departments of American Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, and Program on the
Environment. Our courses are certified to earn students college credit in the
“Ideas and Society” (social science) and “Natural World” (science) core
requirements.

The farm also serves as a grassroots agricultural
extension service station and we conduct a wide range of plant breeding
experiments – one current project focuses on development of a drought- and
weed-resistant Zea Mays (corn)
variety through conventional marker assisted breeding. Using the methods we
have already restored an heirloom variety of the local land race of Phaseolis vulgaris, the common bean, in
this case known as “Bolitas” (little balls).

In this regard, my previously published studies of
the ethnobotany of
the former South Central Farm site demonstrated that the SCF members created
a world-class example of agricultural biodiversity. There was more biodiversity
packed into those ten acres than the entire Midwest farm belt; that’s a fact. The
wide variety of plants grown for food and medicine at SCF were representative
of rare and threatened land race heirloom crops from Mexico and other parts of
Latin America – Peruvian beans for example. It was like having our own little
Mesoamerican Vavilov
Center in the middle of LA.

Of course, politics keeps intervening and a shameless
type of politics at that has already injured the reputation of at least one
former mayor who, honestly, betrayed the farmers even though they raised the
$16 million to buy the land at what was a shamefully inflated and speculative
price – before the 2007 bubble burst.

I ask our current Mayor, when are we going to stop
allowing such groserias [grotesqueries]
of public policy to continue? Instead of returning this urban site back to its
status as a signature and singular achievement for urban agriculture, do you instead
propose to offer more of the same drab industrial landscape and its diminished
value as urban space in the midst of growing communities with spreading
residential occupancy needs?

Will you wrongly choose to introduce an additional
set of new sources of cumulative risk
to a community that is already overburdened with pollution sources and a lack
of green space? Are you as elected representatives of this community really
wishing to perpetuate a politically unwieldy case of environmental racism that
perpetuates social economic injustice? Or, will you be the LA Mayor and Council
remembered for innovative urban planning and the vision to finally embrace a world-renowned
paragon of environmental sustainability and social equity?

My family has strong LA ties. Our father, A. C. ‘Pepe’
Peña wanted the Acequia Institute to become the nation’s first Latina/o
initiated, managed, and funded foundation and grant-maker. We are accomplishing
that goal by serving the singular and worthy mission of promoting the
environmental and food justice movements.

These movements have significant historical roots in
Los Angeles and it is impossible to speak of the history, for e.g., of urban
agriculture without first spending time on the place and continued significant
role of the South Central Farm as a major progenitor of sustainable,
community-based urban farming. The ten-acre site in question is absolutely
vital as green space for the several
thousand persons living within a mile of the site. It is also vital to the tens
of thousands from LA and across the globe who made the site a destination
during the heyday of the SCF (1999-2006).  They will return if the farm is reborn. The
prospects for community renewal for these thousands of neighbors and friends of
the SCF – defenders of an oasis in an otherwise heavily industrialized area – are
directly tied to policies that invest in the revitalization of what was once the
centerpiece of a truly vibrant world-class community garden and local food
system  - indeed, a model for the region
and beyond. The current project proposal violates the prospects of such an
alternative path. The people of LA can raise whatever it takes to pursue this
alternative, so the question remains largely a matter of political will, or
force.

Reviewing the proposal for four industrial buildings,
I paid particular attention to the underlying rationale (i.e., the Port needs
increased capacity among many other unproven declarations and assumptions). I
was struck by the audacious incompleteness of such claims. However, the utter
disregard for and absence of any serious effort at environmental justice
analysis is even more appalling, especially for a case with so much regional
and even national and global significance.

I am therefore also struck by the inherent unfairness of the process of
project scoping and evaluation being followed and proposed. This involves
an absolutely unacceptable failure to integrate community-based values, or to
draw from the proven effectiveness of participatory research methods that will
allow the community, planners, and developers an equal opportunity to get at
data relevant to making a science-based comparative analyses of alternative
uses that have either been extant on the property or proposed in various
creative and democratically-designed projects for a more environmentally,
socially, and cultural appropriate and
multiple set of land uses at the 41^st and Alameda site.

There is a complete lack of open public discourse and
analysis of the proposed land use changes and alternatives. It does not take a scientist
to understand that democracy requires the fullest participation of the public,
and especially the most vulnerable, systematically excluded, and purposefully
marginalized populations and communities. People are not poor or hungry because
they are lazy or choose to be that way. They are poor because the most powerful
actors in our obscenely unequal class society abuse their many political and
social privileges to turn all matters of public policy into private advantage
and profit; the poor and hungry, be damned; The health and dynamism of the
peoples’ city, be damned.

The result is a project proposal envisioning an EIR
process based on politics rather than standards of scientific risk assessment
let alone consideration of federal and state environmental justice principles
and practices. I am concerned that, while the project has been moved to the
“Major Projects” section of the planning office, administrators seem intent in following
a limited scoping and evaluation process that will be seen by the community and
experts as violating protections and practices required of the planning process
since the impacts are of regional, and I would argue global, significance. The
most audacious aspect of this project proposal is the lack of plans for live public
meetings in which the public gets to participate in the “scoping” and
evaluation process.

The public should also be involved in helping to
bring to the fore the alternative land uses that have been proposed or that were
extant on the site in the immediate past (1999-2006). These must figure in any
environmental justice analysis, as has been noted in the past with EIRs for
other industrial project proposals for the site. The only way to meet widely embraced standards is to define and study
the alternatives to the proposed land use action. This will allow the
community, larger public, and city planners to develop a comparative analysis
informing whatever cost-benefit analytic metric is adopted. This also means
serious consideration of the more varied and complex equity and due process
rights imbricated with the development and implementation of municipal land use
policies and practices.

The irony of course is that the alternative proposals
– all drawing from past extant activities – had already set in motion dynamic
economic and social changes to South Los Angeles that were largely driven by
the educational and food justice work of the farmers at SCF. The farmers formed
a functioning and democratic organization for self-management of the land in
question and generated a wide array of public benefits stemming from
educational as well as anti-drug and anti-gang goals and projects. The farm
hosted vibrant and wildly popular events including a monthly “Anti-Mall” that
brought USC medical students to the area for health care monitoring and other
services essential to community health that – like green space – is a rare
resource in the neighborhoods surrounding the proposed project site.

Sincerely,

Devon G. Peña, Ph.D.

President and Founder

The Acequia Institute