President Biden’s push to provide racial equity to restaurant owners and farmers has run into both political and legal roadblocks, The New York Times reported.

Meanwhile, House Agriculture Committee Chairman David Scott, D-Ga., said last week that he supports the Agriculture Department’s attempts to stop the Faust v. Vilsack case against a debt relief program for minority farmers.

“I strongly support and thank Secretary [Tom] Vilsack for standing up and fighting for this critical, urgent and much-needed legislation,” Scott said in a news release.

“This shameful lawsuit is racial discrimination at its worst against our nation’s Black farmers and socially disadvantaged farmers — and I do not say this lightly, because white farmers already own 98% of all the farmland in the United States and Black farmers own just 1 percent.”

“This is of compelling interest to the future of agriculture in our nation because without this vital $5 billion in the American Rescue Plan legislation, this nation could lose the little bit of farmland that’s left of Black-owned farms. The very survival of Black farmers is at stake — and this would be an unpardonable sin because we, as Black slaves, did the hard work and provided the foundation for America’s great agriculture system for free, for over 200 years, under the lash of the slave masters’ whips,” Scott continued.

“In 1930 when my grandfather bought our family farm, where I was born, in Aynor, S.C., 21% of all the farms in the South were owned by Black families. Now, it is just 1%. I am in full support of Secretary Vilsack and the United States Department of Agriculture’s effort to fight this lawsuit,” he concluded.