Greenfield Louisiana announced on Tuesday that it is canceling its nearly three-year-old plans to build a grain export terminal in a historically Black town in St. John the Baptist Parish.
Greenfield, which is owned by San Francisco-based Medlock Investments, made the announcement on Tuesday (Aug. 6), at a public hearing in Wallace, Louisiana, where Greenfield has been trying to secure permits from the Army Corps of Engineers to build the terminal since 2021. The company blamed delays in the permitting process for the cancellation.
“Permits for similar projects usually take 6 months,” the company said in a statement posted to X, formerly known as Twitter. “We’ve been waiting nearly three years. We did everything in our power to keep this project on track because we believe in this community. But today, sadly, we are no closer to a resolution than we were when we began this process.”
Wallace natives Joy and Jo Banner, co-founders of the environmental justice and historical preservation nonprofit The Descendants Project, were at the public hearing. The sisters have been fighting against the project for almost as long as Greenfield has been pushing to break ground on it because they believed the project would cause environmental harm to residents of the city and harm historic sites, possibly including unmarked graves of enslaved people who lived and worked at plantations near the proposed terminal property
Those concerns have been echoed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Joy Banner told Verite News that she was in shock and disbelief when she first heard the announcement, but burst into tears once she realized what happened. She said she was ecstatic that the project appears to be finished.
“We don’t need other people to come in and tell us what’s good for us, what we need, what we should accept,” she told Verite reaction to the news. “Too much extraction has happened already. That’s why we’re Cancer Alley. And we’re putting our foot down, and we’re not taking it anymore.”
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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