Florida Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act

AN ACT OF THE STATE OF FLORIDA 2027 REGULAR SESSION, FLORIDA LEGISLATURE

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HOUSE/SENATE BILL ____

BY __________ (Introduced by request)

An act relating to the establishment of a state program for food and commodity assurance to ensure the material security of all Florida residents; creating sections within chapter 570, Florida Statutes; creating sections within chapter 288, Florida Statutes; making appropriations; and providing effective dates.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF FLORIDA:

LONG TITLE

AN ACT Relating to the creation of the Florida Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act, and, in connection therewith, establishing the Florida Food Assurance Program by creating sections within chapter 570, Florida Statutes, under Title XXXV (Agriculture and Horticulture); creating the Florida Essential Goods Program by creating sections within chapter 288, Florida Statutes; making appropriations; and providing for effective dates and implementation schedules.

LEGISLATIVE ROUTING NOTE

Florida has a citizen ballot initiative process for CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS ONLY. Under Article XI, Section 3 of the Florida Constitution, citizens may propose amendments to the state constitution by petition. The signature requirement is 880,062 valid signatures (eight percent of the approximately 11.0 million votes cast in the 2024 presidential election; Florida Division of Elections, 2026 Petition Signature Requirements). Proposed amendments must comply with the single-subject requirement under Article XI, Section 3 and are reviewed by the Florida Supreme Court for ballot language clarity before signature collection may begin. Constitutional amendments require a sixty percent (60%) supermajority for adoption, as established by Amendment 3 (2006). A Financial Impact Statement prepared by the Financial Impact Estimating Conference is required.

Because the initiative process in Florida is limited to constitutional amendments rather than statutory measures, this act is drafted as a LEGISLATIVE BILL to be introduced through the Florida Legislature by any member of the Senate or House of Representatives. A companion constitutional amendment ballot initiative is prepared separately as Appendix A.

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENT: Upon introduction, this bill would likely be assigned to the Senate Agriculture Committee or the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Appropriations Subcommittee, with a secondary referral to an Appropriations Committee given the bill's budgetary impact.

FISCAL NOTE: The Office of Economic and Demographic Research (EDR) and the Revenue Estimating Conference prepare fiscal impact analyses for all bills with budgetary impact.

FLOOR VOTE: Simple majority in each chamber (21 of 40 Senators; 61 of 120 Representatives). Governor's signature or veto override (two-thirds of each chamber).

SESSION: The Florida Legislature convenes its 60-day Regular Session typically in March. Special sessions may be called by the Governor or by joint action of the presiding officers of each chamber.

REVENUE CONTEXT: Florida has no state income tax, enshrined in the Florida Constitution, Article VII, Section 5. State revenue derives primarily from sales tax (6%), corporate income tax (5.5%), documentary stamp tax, communications services tax, and tourism development taxes. This act does not require or propose a state income tax. All appropriations are funded from existing general revenue sources and are structured to achieve operational self- sufficiency within seven years through volume surcharges.

HISTORY: A version of this proposal was first developed in 2016 through the Sassafras and Maple Research Foundation (SMRF), the first non-partisan political trade school in the United States, registered with the Colorado Department of Higher Education, Division of Private Occupational Schools (DPOS). The original proposal was sidelined during the 2016-2017 legislative cycle in Colorado. The present version incorporates updated research from the Historical Apoplexy series (Cooper, 2025-2026), a ten-paper academic work providing the evidentiary foundation for this legislation.

LEGISLATIVE DECLARATION

Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Florida:

SECTION 1. Legislative findings and declaration.

(1) The Legislature hereby finds, determines, and declares that:

FINDINGS RELATING TO FOOD AND COMMODITY INSECURITY:

(a) According to the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, 13.5 percent of United States households experienced food insecurity in 2023, and 5.1 percent experienced very low food security. Applied to Florida's population of approximately 23.4 million, approximately 3.2 million Floridians lack consistent access to adequate food (Feeding Florida; Feeding South Florida; Florida Association of Food Banks);

(b) Florida's agricultural sector generates approximately $8.1 billion in annual cash receipts from farm marketings (USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service). Florida ranks first in the nation in the production of sugarcane and fresh-market tomatoes and is among the top three producing states for bell peppers, snap beans, cucumbers, squash, watermelons, and winter strawberries (USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service; University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences). Florida's citrus industry, once the largest in the nation, has fallen behind California in orange production after two decades of citrus greening disease. Florida's productive capacity nonetheless vastly exceeds its population's food requirements. Food insecurity in Florida is a distribution problem, not a production problem;

(c) The United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service Food Dollar Series establishes that the farm share of the United States food dollar is 24.3 cents, with the remaining 75.7 cents allocated to processing, transportation, wholesale, retail, and food service markup. This figure is derived from the ENTIRE United States grocery industry, every retailer, every brand from premium to generic, every product category, and represents the industry-wide structural markup, not a figure cherry-picked from expensive retailers. Total United States food-at-home spending is approximately $1.09 trillion; production cost is approximately $213 to $327 billion. The difference of approximately $496 billion represents markup above production cost;

(d) The cost to close the food insecurity gap for all 47.9 million food-insecure Americans is approximately $32 billion, which represents 6.5 percent of the $496 billion markup between production cost and retail price (Cooper, "The Mathematics of Abundance," 2025);

(e) The United States military commissary system, established by the Military Commissary Act of 1867 and now codified at 10 U.S.C. Section 2484, has operated at-cost food distribution continuously for one hundred fifty-nine (159) years through the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA), operating 236 stores worldwide and delivering savings of 17 to 25 percent below civilian retail prices (CONUS) to approximately 2.8 million authorized users. This program is funded by approximately $1.3 billion in annual tax revenue from all federal taxpayers but available only to military families and retirees, establishing a proven precedent for government-operated at-cost food distribution;

(f) The food assurance program established in this act is NOT a nationalization of the food industry, NOT a government seizure of production, and NOT a Soviet-style command economy. The State of Florida will PURCHASE food from existing Florida farms, ranches, producers, cooperatives, and wholesale suppliers at wholesale prices. Every company currently selling food remains in business. Every brand, premium to generic, remains available. The state acts as a wholesale buyer, not a producer. This is the same purchasing relationship that Costco, Sam's Club, and every military commissary uses: buy at wholesale, sell at cost. The distinction between this program and old-world communism is absolute: communist systems seized the means of production; this program purchases from them. Companies keep their profits. Workers keep their jobs. The markup is removed from the consumer end, not from the producer end;

(g) The geographer Albrecht Penck calculated in 1925 that Earth's carrying capacity was eight billion people using 1920s agricultural technology. The current world population is approximately eight billion. Since agricultural technology has advanced substantially beyond 1920s capacity, scarcity of food is not a physical constraint but a distribution and policy constraint (Penck, 1925; Cohen, "How Many People Can the Earth Support?," 1995);

(h) The United States has approximately 293,000 manufacturing facilities. Studies indicate that 10,000 to 15,000 facilities would suffice for universal material abundance, representing 20 to 30 times overcapacity, with United States manufacturing currently operating at approximately 77 percent capacity utilization (Federal Reserve, Cooper, "The Mathematics of Abundance," 2025);

(i) In 2024 alone, 7,325 retail store locations closed in the United States (Cooper, "Stolen Futures," 2025), while 54 million Americans live in food deserts. The commercial retail grocery model is collapsing as a distribution system;

(j) The economist John Kenneth Galbraith described in "The Affluent Society" (1958) the condition of "private opulence and public squalor", the coexistence of enormous private productive capacity with inadequate public provision of basic needs. This condition persists in Florida, where the state's agricultural and manufacturing output vastly exceeds its population's material requirements;

(k) The economist Thorstein Veblen documented in "The Engineers and the Price System" (1921) the deliberate restriction of production capacity by business interests to maintain prices above production cost, a practice he termed the "conscious withdrawal of efficiency." Florida's sugar industry, concentrated in the Everglades Agricultural Area by US Sugar Corporation and Florida Crystals, receives federal subsidies that maintain domestic sugar prices at approximately twice the world market price while polluting the Everglades ecosystem, exemplifying Veblen's production sabotage in real time;

FINDINGS RELATING TO FLORIDA-SPECIFIC CONDITIONS:

(l) Florida is the most hurricane-exposed state in the nation. Hurricane Ian (2022, $110 billion in damage), Hurricane Michael (2018, Category 5), Hurricane Irma (2017), and Hurricane Andrew (1992) collectively demonstrate that every major hurricane exposes the fragility of Florida's food distribution system, grocery stores empty within 48 hours, supply chains collapse, and federal emergency response is consistently delayed. Florida's annual hurricane preparation expenditures exceed $1.5 billion. A state- operated food assurance network with permanent warehousing and regional distribution centers constitutes disaster preparedness infrastructure that serves daily AND during emergencies, replacing the current model of post-disaster emergency procurement with a standing distribution network capable of immediate surge capacity;

(m) Florida hosts one of the largest concentrations of military installations in the nation. MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa serves as the headquarters of United States Central Command (CENTCOM) and United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the commands that direct America's overseas military operations. Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Naval Air Station Pensacola ("Cradle of Naval Aviation"), Patrick Space Force Base and Cape Canaveral, Eglin Air Force Base, Tyndall Air Force Base, Hurlburt Field, Naval Station Mayport, and Coast Guard stations throughout the state employ tens of thousands of military personnel who shop at military commissaries funded by all Florida taxpayers. The commissary model is operating at massive scale on Florida soil. Florida taxpayers fund it. Florida civilians cannot access it;

(n) In Immokalee, Florida, the tomato capital of the United States, migrant farmworkers harvest approximately 90 percent of America's winter tomatoes under conditions documented by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) as including wage theft, forced labor, and poverty wages. The people who pick the tomatoes cannot afford the tomatoes. The MacDill AFB commissary operates 200 miles north in Tampa while Immokalee workers go hungry. This is Galbraith's "private opulence and public squalor" at its most visceral;

(o) Florida has the largest population of residents aged 65 and older in the nation, approximately 4.8 million people, and one of the highest such shares of any state at approximately 21 percent (U.S. Census Bureau; USAFacts). Retirees on fixed incomes are among the most food-insecure demographics. Many relocated to Florida specifically for the no-income-tax benefit but face rising costs of living that fixed retirement income cannot match. The 75.7 percent markup between food production cost and retail price hits fixed-income seniors hardest, they cannot earn more to compensate. The DeCA commissary system already serves military retirees, proving the model works for this demographic;

(p) Florida's tourism industry generates more than $100 billion annually and employs hundreds of thousands of workers at low wages: hotel workers, theme park employees, and restaurant staff in Orlando, Miami, and Tampa. Walt Disney World alone employs more than 75,000 people, many of whom qualify for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. The people who serve Florida's visitors are food insecure. Tourism generates massive state revenue through sales and hotel taxes while the workers who produce that revenue cannot feed their families;

(q) This act does not create new taxes. This act does not require a state income tax. This act restructures food distribution to eliminate artificial markup. This is a market efficiency program, not a tax-and-spend program. The State of Florida is eliminating the 75.7 percent middleman markup by purchasing wholesale, the same way every commissary, every Costco, and every wholesale club in the state already operates. Framed correctly, this is the most fiscally conservative food policy proposal in American legislative history: it SAVES money by removing the markup, rather than spending money to subsidize it;

FINDINGS RELATING TO STRUCTURAL IMPERATIVE FOR STATE ACTION:

(r0) The federal government of the United States has shut down twenty-two (22) times since 1976. The 2025 shutdown lasted forty-three (43) days, furloughed approximately 670,000 federal employees, and cost the economy an estimated seven to fourteen billion dollars. The House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 members since the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, producing a representation ratio of approximately 762,000 constituents per representative, the worst in the OECD. The presidency is so overloaded that legislation is signed by machine (autopen). The Swiss Federal Council has operated a collegial executive for 178 years with over 80 percent citizen trust. The Roman Republic maintained dual consuls for 482 years. The federal government is structurally incapable of delivering programs at the scale and cadence this act requires. The State of Florida must act because the federal government cannot. On this evidence, denial is no longer a neutral position;

(r1) Federal H.R. 1 (2025) increased the state share of SNAP administrative costs from fifty percent to seventy-five percent, effective October 1, 2026. Florida currently routes SNAP benefits through commercial retailers where 75.7 cents of every food dollar pays for markup rather than food. At at-cost routing through the Florida Food Assurance Program, approximately 95 cents of every dollar reaches the recipient as food (production cost plus a facility surcharge not exceeding five percent), a 3.9-fold increase in delivered food value per SNAP dollar that independently offsets the federal cost-shift;

FINDINGS RELATING TO HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT:

(r2) Augustus Caesar formalized the annona civica, monthly grain distribution to approximately 200,000 Roman citizens, as civic infrastructure. Augustus was a documented tyrant: Suetonius records him ordering a Roman knight stabbed on the spot for the offense of taking notes at a public assembly. Even he understood that hungry citizens are broken infrastructure. The annona operated for over 400 years. Emperor Nerva expanded it with the alimenta, child nutrition funded by government loans to farmers, recorded on the Tabula Alimentaria from Veleia (CIL XI 1147), a bronze inscription that still exists and can be visited. At Mabu Co, Tibet, sedentary abundance was sustained 4,400 years ago at 4,446 metres elevation with fishing hooks (Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2024). The Azolla Event, 49 million years ago, demonstrated that a single fern species replicating on freshwater sequestered enough atmospheric CO2 to shift Earth's climate from hothouse to icehouse over 800,000 years (Brinkhuis et al., Nature 441, 2006). Three independent records establish that feeding populations is infrastructure, not charity: the commissary at 159 years, the annona at 400+ years, and biology across geologic time;

(r3) This act is not government ownership of the means of production. The Florida Food Assurance Program contracts with private producers at production cost plus a facility surcharge not exceeding five percent. Farms stay private. Trucks stay private. Processing stays private. Currency survives for luxury, custom, and specialty goods. The Defense Commissary Agency has operated this model since 1867 without acquiring a single farm. The contrast case is the municipal-grocery model advanced by New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, in which a city government owns and operates the store itself. This act is the opposite model: a wholesale purchaser that contracts with private producers and displaces none of them. Costco operates the same private-sector pattern: membership-based, volume purchasing, near-cost pricing. The bill provides a floor. It does not replace the market;

(r4) The retail collapse and autonomous freight are already eliminating distribution jobs. Aurora Innovation operates driverless freight on the Dallas-Houston corridor today. Over 15,000 retail store closures are projected for 2025. The bill does not cause this displacement; it catches the displaced worker at the food counter. Adam Smith warned in 1776 of the worker whose whole life is spent performing a few simple operations; automation reaches that worker first. At-cost distribution eliminates the markup, not the labor: the food assurance program, like the military commissary, still employs truckers, drivers, and warehouse staff;

FINDINGS RELATING TO PUBLIC HEALTH: WHY THIS ACT FEEDS FLORIDIANS BEYOND BARE SURVIVAL:

(r) Sir Michael Marmot's Whitehall Studies, commencing in 1967 and continuing to the present with 10,308 subjects, established that among British civil servants with universal healthcare, full employment, and no absolute poverty, the lowest employment grade experienced three times the mortality rate of the highest grade. Standard risk factors, smoking, cholesterol, blood pressure, explained less than forty percent of the mortality gradient. The hierarchy itself, independent of absolute material deprivation, produces lethal health outcomes;

(s) Dr. Robert Sapolsky's thirty-year study of wild baboon populations in the Serengeti demonstrated that subordinate social position produces chronically elevated cortisol, atherosclerosis, immune suppression, and cognitive impairment. When a tuberculosis outbreak eliminated the most aggressive males from a troop, hierarchy collapsed, and subordinates' cortisol levels normalized, demonstrating that the health damage was caused by the hierarchy, not by inherent individual biology (Sapolsky, "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers," 1994; "Behave," 2017);

(t) Dr. Carol Shively's thirty-year study of female macaques at Wake Forest University demonstrated that subordinate social status directly causes visceral fat accumulation, atherosclerosis, and coronary artery disease, with cingulate cortex serotonin identified as the neurological nexus linking depression to cardiovascular disease (Shively, 2009; 2014);

(u) Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, demonstrated that chronic psychological stress shortens telomeres, the protective caps on chromosomal DNA, accelerating cellular aging. Caregivers of chronically ill children had measurably shorter telomeres proportional to years of stress. Poverty and subordination age human beings at the molecular level (Blackburn & Epel, "The Telomere Effect," 2017);

(v) These findings collectively establish that the gap is the gradient, not the deprivation. Treating sickness downstream of an untreated gradient is documented to fail across four research programs, six decades, and three species: hierarchy itself kills. Poverty and social hierarchy are not merely economic conditions but medical conditions with documented physiological pathways that produce measurable morbidity and mortality. Food and commodity assurance programs therefore constitute public health interventions with quantifiable healthcare cost reduction potential;

(v1) Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis named the right disease at the wrong site. Stratification is the ocean, not the cup. The gradient is the disease; schools, hospitals, and workplaces are downstream of it. Hierarchy itself kills, and the gradient runs through every institution. Targeting any single institution misses the structural mechanism. This is the corrected analysis of Bowles and Gintis (1976) described in the Historical Apoplexy literature as the targeting error (Cooper, Paper V, 2025);

FINDINGS RELATING TO FLORIDA-SPECIFIC HEALTH CONDITIONS:

(w) Florida's elderly population of 4.6 million residents aged 65 and older experiences the Marmot gradient at its steepest: retirees who lose workplace social structure simultaneously face rising costs on fixed incomes. Status loss in retirement combined with material anxiety produces cortisol elevation and telomere degradation. Florida's retirement communities constitute a natural experiment in hierarchy's health effects;

(x) Repeated hurricane exposure creates chronic stress populations. Hurricane Ian, Irma, and Michael each produced post-traumatic stress disorder, displacement, and food insecurity spikes. Post- hurricane health outcomes track Marmot's predictions precisely: the poorest communities recover slowest and suffer most;

(y) First-generation Cuban-American immigrants in Florida demonstrate better health outcomes than predicted by income level, a phenomenon known as the "Hispanic paradox." Research attributes this to strong family networks and social cohesion. This supports this act: social infrastructure produces health outcomes independent of wealth. As assimilation weakens those family networks across subsequent generations, health outcomes decline, exactly as Marmot's hierarchy gradient predicts;

(z) UNIVERSE 25 REBUTTAL. The Calhoun mouse experiment ("Universe 25") is frequently invoked against any abundance-distribution proposal. The argument is a misread. Calhoun's mice collapsed not because they had abundance, but because abundance arrived without institutional infrastructure: food, water, nesting material, and space, with no education, no governance, no intergenerational transmission, no civic role. Abundance of resources plus abundance of ease produces Universe 25. Abundance of resources plus structured civic obligation produces the Augustus annona (400 years), the Defense Commissary (159 years), and the Mabu Co settlement (800 years). The Roman grain dole was distributed to citizens who had civic obligations: military service, public works, jury duty, voting. The commissary is distributed to military families inside an institution that defines daily structure. The institutional scaffolding is what distinguishes sustainable abundance from collapse. MacDill Air Force Base, Naval Air Station Pensacola, Naval Air Station Jacksonville, Naval Station Mayport, Patrick Space Force Base, and Eglin Air Force Base operate this template on Florida soil today;

(2) The Legislature further finds that the food and commodity assurance program established in this act is at once an economic-efficiency measure and a public health intervention. The public health evidence set out in findings (r) through (y) establishes why the program reaches beyond bare caloric survival: the documented physiological harm of poverty and social hierarchy gives the state a direct and measurable interest in the food security of every resident, not the indigent alone. Material security is the floor on which civic capacity is built. Florida possesses the productive capacity, the distribution precedent, and the arithmetic. Denial is no longer neutral.

FLORIDA FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE ACT

SECTION 2. Section 570.961, Florida Statutes, is created to read:

570.961. Short title.

This part shall be known and may be cited as the "Florida Food Assurance Act."

570.962. Definitions.

As used in this part, unless the context otherwise requires:

(1) "At-cost pricing" means the price of a food product calculated as the sum of the direct production cost paid to the producer or supplier plus a facility surcharge not to exceed five percent (5%) of the production cost, with no additional profit margin, markup, or marketing cost applied.

(2) "Commissioner" means the Commissioner of Agriculture.

(3) "Department" means the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

(4) "Food assurance center" means a state-operated facility established under this part for the purpose of distributing food products to Florida residents at at-cost pricing.

(5) "Facility surcharge" means a charge not to exceed five percent (5%) of the production cost of a food product, applied to cover the operational costs of a food assurance center, including but not limited to facility maintenance, labor, utilities, and transportation.

(6) "Production cost" means the cost of producing a food product as determined by the department based on wholesale acquisition price from producers, cooperatives, or the most proximate point in the supply chain to the point of original production.

570.963. Florida food assurance program; creation; purpose.

(1) There is hereby created in the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services the Florida food assurance program.

(2) The purpose of the program is to establish state-operated food distribution centers where all Florida residents may purchase the full range of grocery products at at-cost pricing, modeled on the United States military commissary system as authorized by 10 U.S.C. Section 2484 and as operated by the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) continuously since 1867.

(3) The program operates as a WHOLESALE PURCHASING PROGRAM. The state purchases food from existing Florida farms, ranches, producers, cooperatives, and wholesale suppliers at wholesale prices. No company is nationalized. No production facility is seized. Every company currently selling food continues to sell food. The state acts as a bulk buyer, identical in function to Costco, Sam's Club, or any military commissary, and passes the wholesale price to Florida residents with a facility surcharge not exceeding 5 percent.

(4) The program shall:

(a) Establish and operate food assurance centers throughout the state of Florida;

(b) Purchase food products directly from Florida producers, cooperatives, and wholesale suppliers at or near production cost;

(c) Sell food products to Florida residents at at-cost pricing as defined in section 570.962;

(d) Prioritize procurement from Florida farms and ranches to the maximum extent practicable;

(e) Accept all forms of payment including but not limited to cash, electronic benefit transfer (EBT), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) vouchers;

(f) Operate without profit motive, with all revenue above operational costs reinvested in program expansion;

(g) Maintain permanent warehousing and regional distribution capacity sufficient to serve as hurricane and disaster preparedness infrastructure, with surge capacity protocols activated within twenty-four (24) hours of any declaration of emergency under chapter 252, Florida Statutes.

570.964. Pilot food assurance centers; locations; timeline.

(1) Within two (2) years of the effective date of this part, the department shall establish not fewer than seven (7) pilot food assurance centers in the following regions:

(a) Two (2) centers in the Miami-Dade/Broward/Palm Beach metropolitan area, with at least one center serving communities in proximity to Immokalee and the agricultural corridor of Southwest Florida;

(b) Two (2) centers in the Orlando/Central Florida region, including one center in proximity to the I-4 corridor tourism employment centers;

(c) One (1) center in the Tampa Bay metropolitan area, in proximity to MacDill Air Force Base;

(d) One (1) center in the Jacksonville/Northeast Florida region, serving the Naval Air Station Jacksonville and Naval Station Mayport communities;

(e) One (1) center in the Pensacola/Northwest Florida ("Panhandle") region, serving the Naval Air Station Pensacola and Eglin Air Force Base communities and areas impacted by Hurricane Michael.

(2) Within five (5) years of the effective date of this part, the department shall expand the program to not fewer than thirty (30) food assurance centers statewide, with at least one center in each congressional district and at least five (5) centers serving rural agricultural communities as defined by the department.

(3) The department shall prioritize locations with the highest rates of food insecurity, the greatest distances to existing grocery retail, the largest populations residing in food deserts, and the most frequent hurricane impact.

(4) All food assurance centers shall be constructed to current Florida Building Code hurricane resistance standards and designed to maintain operations during and immediately following hurricanes and declared emergencies.

570.965. Florida food assurance fund; creation.

(1) There is hereby created in the State Treasury the Florida food assurance fund.

(2) The fund shall consist of:

(a) Moneys appropriated by the Legislature;

(b) Facility surcharge revenue collected pursuant to section 570.962;

(c) Grants, gifts, and donations;

(d) Federal funds made available for food distribution programs;

(e) Any other moneys authorized by law.

(3) Moneys in the fund shall be used exclusively for the purposes of this part and are continuously appropriated to the department for such purposes.

570.966. Procurement; Florida-first.

(1) Within three (3) years of the effective date of this part, not less than fifty percent (50%) of all food products sold through food assurance centers shall be sourced from Florida farms, ranches, and producers.

(2) Within five (5) years of the effective date of this part, the Florida-sourced share shall increase to not less than seventy percent (70%).

(3) The department shall establish procurement partnerships with Florida agricultural cooperatives, the Florida Farm Bureau, and individual producers, with particular emphasis on supporting small and minority-owned agricultural operations and farmworker cooperatives in Immokalee and the agricultural regions of South and Central Florida.

570.967. Tribal consultation.

(1) Food assurance centers serving communities in proximity to the Seminole Tribe of Florida or the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida shall be developed only in consultation with the respective tribal government.

(2) Nothing in this part diminishes any treaty right, inherent sovereign authority, or self-governance of the Seminole Tribe of Florida or the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. The Seminole Tribe never signed a peace treaty with the United States government. This act acknowledges that unique sovereignty.

(3) Tribal food sovereignty is respected. If either tribe elects to operate its own food distribution system in lieu of or in addition to state food assurance centers, the department shall cooperate with and support such tribal programs.

FLORIDA ESSENTIAL GOODS PROGRAM

SECTION 3. Section 288.1251, Florida Statutes, is created to read:

288.1251. Florida essential goods program; creation; purpose.

(1) There is hereby created within the Department of Economic Opportunity the Florida essential goods program.

(2) The purpose of the program is to produce and distribute clothing, household supplies, hygiene products, tools, educational materials, and other essential goods at below-retail pricing through manufacturing partnerships and direct procurement, supporting Florida-based manufacturing and reducing the cost of essential non-food goods for Florida residents.

(3) The department shall establish partnerships with Florida manufacturers, with emphasis on creating manufacturing employment in communities with high unemployment and in regions recovering from hurricane damage.

GENERAL PROVISIONS

SECTION 4. Appropriation.

(1) FOOD PROGRAM TARGET. The at-cost food assurance program established in this act, serving Florida's population of approximately 23.4 million residents [SOURCE: Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research, January 2026; U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2024], requires approximately $7.2 billion per year at production cost ($309 per person per year for a base list of staple food items at 30 percent of the cheapest retail price, per the USDA Food Dollar Series methodology [SOURCE: USDA Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series, 2023]). This represents approximately 14.3 percent of Florida's $50.3 billion general revenue fund [SOURCE: Florida FY2025-26 General Appropriations Act; Florida Policy Institute, July 2025; NASBO].

(2) FISCAL CONVERGENCE. The arithmetic says ending the food gap costs a single-digit percentage of the markup the state already pays. The operational template has run for one hundred fifty-nine years inside the same federal apparatus the state already funds. Florida is not asked to attempt something untested. Florida is asked to deliver to its own residents what its veterans have received since 1867. Florida currently spends approximately $4.2 billion annually on SNAP benefits [SOURCE: Florida Department of Children and Families, SNAP benefit data] routed through commercial retailers, where 75.7 cents of every food dollar pays for markup rather than food [SOURCE: USDA Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series, 2023]. At at-cost routing through the food assurance program, each of those dollars delivers 3.9 times the food. The SNAP expenditure alone, rerouted through the program, feeds approximately 13.6 million Floridians at production cost before any new appropriation.

(3) PHASED APPROPRIATION. There is hereby appropriated from the General Revenue Fund to the following departments the following amounts for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2028, as initial implementation funding:

Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (food assurance: pilot centers and procurement): $500,000,000

Department of Economic Opportunity (essential goods program): $30,000,000

TOTAL INITIAL APPROPRIATION: $530,000,000

This initial total represents approximately 1.05 percent of Florida's $50.3 billion general revenue fund. The program scales toward full coverage over five years as distribution centers open, volume purchasing reduces per-unit cost, and SNAP rerouting offsets new spending.

(4) No new taxes are created by this act. No income tax is proposed, required, or contemplated. All appropriations are funded from existing general revenue sources. The fiscal question is not whether to spend, but whether to continue spending several times as much as required to accomplish the same objective. Denial is no longer neutral.

SECTION 5. Effective dates.

(1) The Florida Food Assurance Program and the Florida Essential Goods Program established by this act take effect July 1, 2028. Pilot food assurance centers shall be operational within two years of that date.

(2) The procurement schedules, fund provisions, and surge-capacity requirements of sections 570.961 through 570.967 and section 288.1251, Florida Statutes, take effect on the same date and are implemented on the timelines stated in those sections.

SECTION 6. Severability.

If any provision of this act or its application to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the invalidity does not affect other provisions or applications of this act which can be given effect without the invalid provision or application, and to this end the provisions of this act are severable.

SECTION 7. Tribal sovereignty.

Nothing in this act diminishes any treaty right, inherent sovereign authority, or self-governance of the Seminole Tribe of Florida or the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida. The Seminole Tribe of Florida has never signed a peace treaty with the United States government. This act acknowledges and respects that unique historical and legal status. Any programs established under this act that may affect tribal lands or communities shall be implemented only through government-to-government partnership, not imposition.

REFERENCES

The research and citations supporting this legislation are drawn from the following primary sources, as documented in the Historical Apoplexy paper series (Cooper, 2025-2026):

FOOD AND COMMODITY ECONOMICS: - USDA Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series (2023) - USDA Economic Research Service, Household Food Security in the United States (2024 release) - Cooper, I. The Mathematics of Abundance: Two Proofs That Scarcity Is a Policy Choice (2025) - 10 U.S.C. Section 2484 (military commissary no-profit pricing) - Military Commissary Act of 1867 - Penck, A. Earth carrying-capacity calculation (1925) - Cohen, J. How Many People Can the Earth Support? (1995) - Galbraith, J.K. The Affluent Society (1958) - Veblen, T. The Engineers and the Price System (1921) - Federal Reserve Board, Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization (G.17) - Fresco, J. The Venus Project; resource-based economy (2007) - Coalition of Immokalee Workers, farmworker documentation

PUBLIC HEALTH AND HIERARCHY: - Marmot, M. Whitehall Studies (1967-present); The Status Syndrome (2004); The Health Gap (2015) - Sapolsky, R. Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers (1994); Behave (2017) - Shively, C. Social Stress and Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis (2009) - Blackburn, E. and Epel, E. The Telomere Effect (2017) - Bowles, S. and Gintis, H. Schooling in Capitalist America (1976), and the corrected reading in Cooper, Paper V - Smith, A. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part III (1776)

HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT: - Suetonius, Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Life of Augustus (Loeb Classical Library) - Appian, Civil Wars; Cassius Dio, Roman History (Nerva alimenta) - CIL XI 1147, Tabula Alimentaria from Veleia - Brinkhuis, H. et al. Episodic fresh surface waters in the Eocene Arctic Ocean, Nature 441 (2006) - Yang, X. et al. Lake-centred sedentary lifestyle at Mabu Co, Nature Ecology and Evolution (September 2024)

FEDERAL STRUCTURAL CONTEXT: - H.R. 1 (2025), SNAP administrative cost-shift - U.S. Senate cloture records; Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 - Swiss Federal Council, history of the collegial executive

FLORIDA-SPECIFIC: - Florida Constitution, Article VII, Section 5 (no income tax) - Florida Constitution, Article XI, Section 3 (citizen initiative) - Chapter 252, Florida Statutes (Emergency Management) - Chapter 570, Florida Statutes (Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services) - Chapter 288, Florida Statutes (Economic Opportunity) - Florida Policy Institute, Florida FY 2025-26 Budget Introduction and Revenue Overview (July 2025) - Florida Division of Elections, 2026 Petition Signature Requirements

HISTORICAL APOPLEXY FRAMEWORK (Cooper, 2025-2026): - Paper I, Historical Apoplexy: Concept Definition (2025) - Paper II, Historical Arc (2026) - Paper III, The Mathematics of Abundance (2025) - Paper IV, Stolen Futures (2025) - Paper V, The Targeting Error (2026) - Paper VI, The Resuscitation Document (2026) - Paper VII, The Structural Overload (2026) - Paper VIII, Venus Prime (2026) - Paper X, The Maturity Void (2026)

END OF BILL

FLORIDA FOOD, RESOURCE, AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE ACT 2027 Regular Session, Florida Legislature

Prepared by: The Amanuensis, theamanuensis.com Originally proposed: 2016 (Cooper, SMRF, Colorado DPOS) Adapted to Florida: 2026

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Verification notes & full source chain

Constitutional path: Citizen-initiative-capable.

Distribution-model precedent: The U.S. Defense Commissary Agency (10 U.S.C. § 2484), operational since 1867, sells groceries at cost plus a five-percent maintenance surcharge with no profit allowed by law. 2.8 million authorized users, 236 stores worldwide, $4 billion annual sales, $1.3 billion federal appropriation paid by all taxpayers including the 330+ million civilians denied access. This bill extends the same at-cost distribution model to all residents of Florida.

Public-health-equity evidence: The Marmot Whitehall Studies (1967-present), Sapolsky's Serengeti baboons, Shively's cynomolgus macaques, and Blackburn's Nobel-winning telomere research establish that hierarchy itself kills across four research programmes, six decades, and three species. The gap is the gradient. Food assurance reaches beyond bare survival because the gradient damages population health even where calorie minimums are met.

Abundance arithmetic: 293,000 U.S. manufacturing facilities at 77 percent utilization; 19.5-29.3× the productive overcapacity required to provide universal abundance in consumer goods. 47.9 million Americans food-insecure; $32 billion ends domestic hunger; $496 billion is the annual U.S. food-industry markup over production cost; the gap is operational evidence of manufactured scarcity, not evidence of resource constraint. See Paper III, The Mathematics of Abundance.