Georgia Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act

GEORGIA GENERAL ASSEMBLY 2027-2028 Regular Session

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H.B. ____

BY __________ (Introduced by request)

AN ACT TO AMEND THE OFFICIAL CODE OF GEORGIA ANNOTATED SO AS TO ESTABLISH A STATE PROGRAM FOR FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE TO ENSURE THE MATERIAL SECURITY OF ALL GEORGIA RESIDENTS; TO AMEND TITLE 2 OF THE OFFICIAL CODE OF GEORGIA ANNOTATED; TO MAKE APPROPRIATIONS; TO PROVIDE FOR AN EFFECTIVE DATE; TO REPEAL CONFLICTING LAWS; AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES.

A BILL FOR AN ACT

LEGISLATIVE ROUTING NOTE

Georgia does not have a citizen initiative process. Under Article III, Section V of the Georgia Constitution, legislative power is vested exclusively in the General Assembly. This bill must be introduced by a member of the Georgia House of Representatives or the Georgia Senate and passed through the standard legislative process.

The Georgia General Assembly meets annually, convening on the second Monday in January. The session is limited to forty (40) legislative days, which typically spans from January through late March or early April. Crossover Day, typically around Day 28 to 30, is the deadline by which a bill must pass its chamber of origin to remain viable. Any bill that does not pass its originating chamber by Crossover Day is effectively dead for that session.

This bill must be filed early in the session and assigned to committee immediately to meet the Crossover Day deadline. The forty-day session leaves no room for delay.

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENT: Upon introduction, this bill would likely be assigned to the House Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Committee or the Senate Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Committee. Given the fiscal impact, it may also be referred to the House Appropriations Committee or the Senate Appropriations Committee.

FISCAL NOTE: The Office of Planning and Budget (OPB), the House Budget and Research Office (HBRO), and the Senate Budget and Evaluation Office (SBEO) prepare fiscal analyses for bills with budgetary impact.

FLOOR VOTE: Simple majority in each chamber (91 of 180 Representatives; 29 of 56 Senators). Governor's signature or veto override (two-thirds of each chamber, per Article III, Section V, Paragraph XIII of the Georgia Constitution).

FISCAL FRAMEWORK: Georgia's total state budget for fiscal year 2027 is approximately thirty-six billion six hundred million dollars ($36,600,000,000), signed by Governor Kemp on May 12, 2026, with education and healthcare comprising the majority of that total. Georgia's fiscal year runs July 1 through June 30. Revenue derives from state income tax (5.19% flat rate as of 2025, reduced from the prior graduated structure), sales tax (4% state rate plus local option), property tax (locally administered), and federal funds. Georgia has maintained strong fiscal reserves and received AAA credit ratings.

BIPARTISAN FRAMING: This bill reduces Georgia's dependence on federal programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid emergency room utilization, and federal disaster relief. Conservative members: Georgia paying for Georgians is structurally less expensive than Georgia depending on Washington. Progressive members: the gradient that Martin Luther King Jr. identified as violence is the same gradient that Marmot, Sapolsky, and Blackburn proved kills biologically. Both positions converge on the same legislation.

HISTORY: The original 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 drafted for the State of Colorado and was sidelined during the 2016-2017 legislative cycle. The present Georgia version incorporates updated research from the Historical Apoplexy series (Cooper, 2025-2026), a ten-paper academic work providing the evidentiary foundation for this legislation. Georgia is the eleventh state adaptation, following Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, California, Ohio, Michigan, Arizona, Oregon, Texas, and additional states. Georgia is the moral closer of the series, because Georgia is where Martin Luther King Jr. said it first, and the science proved him right.

LEGISLATIVE DECLARATION

BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF GEORGIA:

SECTION 1. Legislative findings and declaration.

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

FINDINGS RELATING TO THE STRUCTURAL IMPERATIVE FOR STATE ACTION:

(a0) Twenty-two federal government shutdowns since 1976, including a forty-three-day shutdown in 2025, the longest in United States history, which furloughed approximately 670,000 federal employees. The United States House of Representatives has been frozen at 435 members since the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, producing a ratio of 762,000 constituents per representative, the worst in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Senate cloture motions, 49 in total from 1917 to 1970, now exceed 2,000 per decade. Federal H.R. 1 (2025) shifted SNAP administrative costs from fifty percent to seventy-five percent state share. The federal machine is structurally overloaded (Cooper, Paper VII, 2026). The State of Georgia has the authority to act under its own legislative power rather than await federal action that structural overload prevents;

(a0a) THE MULTI-EXECUTIVE PRECEDENT. A single overloaded executive is not the only constitutional design available. The Swiss Federal Council has operated as a seven-member collegial executive with an annually rotating presidency since 1848, one hundred seventy-eight years, and sustains citizen trust above eighty percent. The Roman Republic placed executive authority in two consuls for four hundred eighty-two years. The structural overload Georgia confronts at the federal level is a design choice, not a law of nature, and a state acting within its own authority is acting where the functional capacity still exists;

(a2) 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. Fort Moore (formerly Fort Benning), Fort Stewart, Fort Eisenhower, Robins Air Force Base, Moody Air Force Base, Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, and Marine Corps Logistics Base Albany operate this template on Georgia soil today;

(a1) DENIAL IS NO LONGER NEUTRAL. Inaction by a legislature possessing the authority, capacity, and documented need to act constitutes active harm. The burden rests on denial;

FINDINGS RELATING TO FOOD AND COMMODITY INSECURITY:

(a) According to the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service and Feeding America's Map the Meal Gap study (2025), one (1) in seven (7) Georgians, approximately 1,600,000 people, experience food insecurity. One (1) in five (5) Georgia children face hunger. Food insecurity rates are rising in Georgia, with rural south Georgia counties experiencing some of the worst food insecurity in the nation;

(b) Georgia's agricultural sector generates in excess of eighteen billion dollars ($18,300,000,000) in annual farm gate value (University of Georgia 2024 Ag Snapshots, based on 2022 Farm Gate Report), making Georgia one of the most productive agricultural states in America. Georgia is the number one (1) producer in the United States of peanuts and broiler chickens, and a leading national producer of pecans, blueberries, peaches, Vidalia onions (a legally protected designation of origin under O.C.G.A. Section 2-8-50 et seq.), cotton, tobacco, and eggs. Food insecurity in Georgia is a distribution failure, not a production failure;

(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. 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, delivering savings of 17 to 25 percent below civilian retail prices in CONUS and up to 64 percent overseas to approximately 2.8 million authorized users through 236 stores worldwide. Georgia hosts major military installations with active commissary operations at Fort Eisenhower (formerly Fort Gordon, Augusta), Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield (Hinesville), Robins Air Force Base (Warner Robins, the largest single-site industrial complex in Georgia), Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, Moody Air Force Base, and Fort Moore (formerly Fort Benning, Columbus). The commissary model operates on Georgia soil while Black Belt counties less than one hundred (100) miles away have no grocery stores at all. This program is funded by all federal taxpayers but available only to military families and retirees;

(f) 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);

(g) The United States has approximately 293,000 manufacturing facilities. Studies indicate that 10,000 to 15,000 facilities would suffice to supply the basic material needs of the entire United States population, representing 19.5 to 29.3 times overcapacity, with United States manufacturing currently operating at approximately 77 percent capacity utilization (Federal Reserve, Cooper, "The Mathematics of Abundance," 2025);

(h) In 2024 alone, 7,325 retail grocery store locations closed in the United States (Cooper, "Stolen Futures," 2025), while 54 million Americans live in food deserts. Rural south Georgia counties constitute some of the most severe food deserts in the southeastern United States, with entire counties lacking a single grocery store. The commercial retail grocery model is collapsing as a distribution system;

(i) 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 is acutely visible in Georgia, where the global corporate headquarters of Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, UPS, Home Depot, and CNN are located in metropolitan Atlanta while rural south Georgia Black Belt counties experience persistent poverty rates of thirty to forty percent (30-40%);

(j) 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." The gap between Georgia's productive capacity and its residents' material security reflects this structural dynamic;

(k) The Georgia Paradox: Georgia is the number one (1) producer of broiler chicken in the United States. Georgia's poultry processing industry employs tens of thousands of workers in some of the most dangerous, lowest-paid jobs in American manufacturing, repetitive stress injuries, chemical exposure, line speeds that the United States Department of Agriculture continues to increase. These workers process the nation's protein and face food insecurity themselves. The people closest to production are furthest from benefit;

(l) The Port of Savannah is the fastest-growing container port on the United States East and Gulf coasts and the largest single-terminal container facility in North America. Goods flow through Georgia to the entire eastern United States at industrial scale. The logistics infrastructure for food and commodity distribution already exists in Georgia, this proposal redirects it toward Georgia residents, not builds it from nothing;

FINDINGS RELATING TO HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT:

(l1) 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-plus years, and biology across geologic time;

(l2) THIS ACT IS NOT GOVERNMENT OWNERSHIP. This act does not transfer farms, processing plants, trucking, or any other private enterprise into government ownership. The food and commodity assurance program contracts with private producers, distributors, and processors at production cost plus a surcharge not exceeding five percent. Farms stay private. Trucks stay private. Processing stays private. The contrast case is the New York City municipal-grocery model proposed by Mayor Mamdani, in which the city itself owns and operates the store; this act does not do that. It operates an at-cost distribution point that contracts with the existing private supply chain. The Defense Commissary Agency has run exactly this model since 1867 without acquiring a single farm, and Costco demonstrates the private-sector parallel: membership-based, volume-purchased, near-cost pricing. Currency survives for luxury, custom, artisanal, and specialty goods. This act provides a floor. It does not replace the market;

(l3) THE AUTOMATION ARGUMENT, ANSWERED. The retail collapse and autonomous freight are already eliminating distribution jobs. Aurora Innovation operates driverless freight on the Dallas-Houston corridor today. More than 15,000 retail store closures were recorded across 2025. This act does not cause that displacement; the retail collapse and autonomous freight do. This act is what catches the workers when the distribution jobs end: a food and commodity floor that does not depend on holding a job in a collapsing sector. At-cost distribution eliminates the markup, not the labor. The military commissary has operated for 159 years and still employs truckers, stockers, and clerks; what it does not carry is the profit markup layered on top of that labor. Adam Smith named this worker precisely: the one whose whole life is spent performing a few simple operations. The displacement is not new. The instrument that catches it is;

FINDINGS RELATING TO PUBLIC HEALTH AND HIERARCHY:

(m) 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;

(n) 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);

(o) 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);

(p) 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);

(p1) THE GRADIENT IS THE DISEASE. The four findings above, Marmot, Sapolsky, Shively, and Blackburn, converge on a single conclusion: the gap is the gradient, not the deprivation. Marmot's civil servants had universal healthcare, full employment, and no absolute poverty, and the lowest grade still died at three times the rate of the highest. Treating sickness downstream of an untreated gradient is documented to fail across four research programs, six decades, and three species. Hierarchy itself kills. A food and commodity assurance program is therefore not charity layered on top of a health system. It is a structural intervention at the gradient that the health system can otherwise only treat downstream, after the damage is done;

(p2) BOWLES AND GINTIS NAMED THE RIGHT DISEASE AT THE WRONG SITE. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis correctly identified that socioeconomic stratification reproduces across generations, but they isolated the school as its engine. Stratification is the ocean, not the cup. The gradient is the disease; schools are downstream of it, as are housing, diet, healthcare, employment, and criminal justice. Hierarchy itself kills, and the gradient runs through every institution. Targeting any single institution, the school or any other, misses the structural mechanism. This act treats the gradient where the mechanism actually operates: at the level of material security (Cooper, Paper V, 2026);

(q) THE BLACK BELT: Georgia's Black Belt, a region of dark fertile soil stretching across rural south and central Georgia, historically associated with the majority-Black population and former plantation geography, constitutes one of the most persistently impoverished geographies in the United States. Poverty rates in Black Belt counties range from thirty to forty percent (30-40%). Life expectancy is ten to fifteen (10-15) years below the state average. Maternal mortality rates are comparable to those in developing nations. According to the Georgia Hospital Association, twelve (12) hospitals, rural and metropolitan, have closed in Georgia since 2013, with the nearest emergency room now forty-five (45) or more minutes away in many Black Belt counties. The Black Belt is the Marmot gradient made geographic, the same soil that grows the peanuts and pecans, the people living on it are dying younger, sicker, and hungrier than Georgians one hundred (100) miles north in Atlanta. This is not new poverty. It maps directly onto plantation geography. The gradient was established by slavery, maintained by Jim Crow, and perpetuated by institutional disinvestment. Blackburn's telomere research explains the intergenerational transmission, chronic stress shortens telomeres in parents, pre-damaging the next generation before birth;

(r) RURAL HOSPITAL CLOSURES: According to the Georgia Hospital Association, twelve (12) hospitals, rural and metropolitan, have closed in Georgia since 2013, more than almost any state in the nation. Georgia refused Medicaid expansion until 2023 (partial waiver only). When a rural hospital closes, the hierarchy withdraws health infrastructure from the subordinated population. Maternal mortality, cardiac event outcomes, and stroke survival rates all worsen dramatically. This is Marmot's gradient expressed as policy, the state decided which communities receive hospitals and which do not;

(s) POULTRY PROCESSING WORKER HEALTH: Georgia's poultry processing workforce, among the lowest-paid, most physically dangerous positions in American manufacturing, processes more chicken than any state in the nation. These workers experience disproportionate rates of repetitive stress injury, respiratory illness, and chemical exposure. Sapolsky's subordination-to- cortisol-to-disease pathway is visible in poultry worker health outcomes. The people who feed America cannot afford to eat well;

(t) THE CIVIL RIGHTS FOUNDATION: Atlanta is the cradle of the American civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta in 1929. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was headquartered in Atlanta. Representative John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Georgia's moral authority. The Atlanta University Center, Morehouse College, Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University, is the largest consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the world. The civil rights movement was fundamentally about the gradient, demanding that the hierarchy stop killing people. Marmot's Whitehall Studies proved biologically what Dr. King articulated morally: the gradient itself is the violence. In his 1964 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Dr. King declared that poverty could be abolished. In his 1967 address "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?" he explicitly called for a guaranteed income. His Poor People's Campaign of 1968, cut short by assassination, was a legislative demand for exactly the kind of material assurance this bill provides. This proposal is the legislative embodiment of that unfinished work;

(u) These findings collectively establish that poverty, food insecurity, 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;

(2) The General Assembly further finds that the food and commodity assurance program established in this Act is, at the same time, a public health intervention. The public health findings above are not background. They are the reason the program reaches beyond bare survival: hierarchy and food insecurity inflict measurable physiological damage, and delivering material security at the gradient is the structural point where that damage can be interrupted.

(3) The General Assembly declares that Martin Luther King Jr. told this state that the gradient was violence. Science has proved him right. This bill is the remedy.

SECTION 2. Title 2 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, relating to agriculture, is amended by adding a new Chapter 17 to read as follows:

ARTICLE 1 Georgia Food Assurance Program

2-17-1. Short title.

This chapter shall be known and may be cited as the "Georgia Food Assurance Act."

2-17-2. Definitions.

As used in this chapter, 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 Georgia Department of Agriculture.

(4) "Food assurance center" means a state-operated facility established under this chapter for the purpose of distributing food products to Georgia 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.

2-17-3. Georgia food assurance program, creation, purpose.

(1) There is hereby created in the Department of Agriculture the Georgia food assurance program.

(2) The purpose of the program is to establish state-operated food distribution centers where all Georgia 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 shall:

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

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

(c) Sell food products to Georgia residents at at-cost pricing as defined in Code Section 2-17-2;

(d) Prioritize procurement from Georgia 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.

2-17-4. Pilot food assurance centers, locations, timeline.

(1) Within two (2) years of the effective date of this chapter, the department shall establish not fewer than eight (8) pilot food assurance centers in the following regions:

(a) Two (2) centers in the Atlanta metropolitan area, with at least one center in a food desert community;

(b) One (1) center in the Savannah metropolitan area, leveraging the Port of Savannah's distribution infrastructure;

(c) One (1) center in the Augusta metropolitan area;

(d) One (1) center in the Columbus/Fort Moore metropolitan area;

(e) One (1) center in the Macon-Bibb County area, serving as a gateway to the Black Belt;

(f) Two (2) centers in rural south Georgia Black Belt counties, specifically targeting counties that currently lack a grocery store, to be selected by the department in consultation with local governments and community organizations.

(2) Within five (5) years of the effective date of this chapter, 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 eight (8) centers serving rural Black Belt communities.

(3) The department shall prioritize locations with the highest rates of food insecurity, the greatest distances to existing grocery retail, the highest concentration of rural hospital closures, and the largest populations residing in food deserts.

(4) The Port of Savannah's distribution logistics shall be utilized by the department to minimize transportation costs for food assurance centers statewide. The department shall establish partnerships with the Georgia Ports Authority for preferential handling of food assurance program shipments.

2-17-5. Georgia food assurance fund, creation.

(1) There is hereby created in the state treasury the Georgia food assurance fund.

(2) The fund shall consist of:

(a) Moneys appropriated by the General Assembly;

(b) Revenue from facility surcharges collected by food assurance centers;

(c) Grants, gifts, and donations from any source, public or private;

(d) Any federal funds made available for food distribution programs.

(3) Moneys in the fund are continuously appropriated to the department for the purposes of this chapter.

(4) The department shall maintain separate accounting for each food assurance center and shall publish annual financial reports demonstrating the production cost, facility surcharge, and total cost to consumers for each product category.

2-17-6. Georgia producer priority.

(1) The department shall establish procurement protocols that prioritize Georgia-produced food products. Not less than fifty percent (50%) of the total wholesale acquisition value of food products purchased by food assurance centers shall be from Georgia producers in the first three (3) years, increasing to not less than sixty-five percent (65%) by the fifth year.

(2) The department shall establish guaranteed purchase contracts with Georgia farms, ranches, and cooperatives to provide stable revenue for Georgia agricultural producers and to reduce producer dependence on commodity market price volatility.

(3) Given Georgia's position as the number one (1) producer of peanuts and broiler chickens in the United States, and a leading producer of pecans, blueberries, and other commodities, the department shall ensure that these commodities are available at every food assurance center at at-cost pricing. The food Georgia grows can feed the people who grow it.

2-17-7. Reporting.

(1) The department shall submit an annual report to the General Assembly by January 31 of each year, beginning the second year after the effective date of this chapter, containing:

(a) The number and locations of food assurance centers in operation;

(b) Total sales volume and number of customers served;

(c) Average savings per customer compared to commercial retail pricing;

(d) Percentage of procurement from Georgia producers;

(e) Operational costs and surcharge revenue;

(f) Progress toward self-sufficiency through surcharge revenue;

(g) Impact on SNAP benefit utilization rates in served areas;

(h) Specific impact data for Black Belt counties served, including changes in food insecurity rates, food desert coverage, and health outcome indicators.

SECTION 3. Title 2 of the Official Code of Georgia Annotated is further amended by adding Article 2 to Chapter 17 to read as follows:

ARTICLE 2 Georgia Essential Goods Program

2-17-20. Short title.

This article shall be known and may be cited as the "Georgia Essential Goods Act."

2-17-21. Definitions.

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

(1) "Below-retail pricing" means a price calculated as the production cost plus a surcharge not to exceed ten percent (10%) of the production cost.

(2) "Essential goods" means basic consumer products necessary for daily life, including but not limited to:

(a) Clothing and footwear;

(b) Household cleaning and maintenance supplies;

(c) Personal hygiene products;

(d) School and educational supplies;

(e) Basic home furnishings;

(f) Basic tools and hardware.

(3) "Department" means the Georgia Department of Economic Development.

2-17-22. Georgia essential goods program, creation, purpose.

(1) There is hereby created in the Georgia Department of Economic Development the Georgia essential goods program.

(2) The purpose of the program is to create procurement contracts with Georgia manufacturers to produce and distribute essential goods at below-retail pricing through food assurance centers established under Article 1 of this chapter and through dedicated distribution points established under this article.

(3) The program shall:

(a) Identify essential goods categories suitable for Georgia manufacturing, including Georgia's automotive manufacturing sector (Kia Georgia, Rivian, Hyundai, SK Battery), aerospace sector (Lockheed Martin, Gulfstream), and consumer goods manufacturing;

(b) Establish guaranteed purchase contracts with Georgia manufacturers to produce essential goods at production cost;

(c) Distribute essential goods at below-retail pricing through food assurance centers and through dedicated distribution points;

(d) Stimulate Georgia's manufacturing sector through guaranteed demand contracts;

(e) Expand essential goods distribution as Georgia manufacturing procurement contracts mature, toward the goal of statewide coverage.

(4) The United States has approximately 293,000 manufacturing facilities, of which 10,000 to 15,000 would suffice to supply the basic material needs of the entire United States population. Georgia's growing manufacturing sector, including massive recent investment in electric vehicle production and battery manufacturing, has the capacity to meet the state's essential goods requirements through targeted procurement (Cooper, "The Mathematics of Abundance," 2025; Federal Reserve capacity utilization data).

2-17-23. Distribution model, tiered by permanence.

(1) The distribution of essential goods shall be tiered by permanence, following the distribution-by-need model described by Jacque Fresco (2007), in which goods are distributed according to need:

(a) Constant-need goods, including food and consumable supplies, shall be distributed on a recurring basis through food assurance centers;

(b) Semi-permanent goods, including clothing and household supplies, shall be distributed on a need-based schedule with reasonable limits to prevent hoarding;

(c) Permanent goods, including durable home furnishings, tools, and appliances, shall be distributed on a one-per- household basis;

(d) Currency shall survive for luxury, custom, and specialty goods not covered by the essential goods program.

2-17-24. Reporting.

(1) The department shall submit an annual report to the General Assembly by January 31 of each year, beginning the second year after the effective date of this article, containing:

(a) Total procurement volume and value of contracts awarded to Georgia manufacturers;

(b) Number and types of essential goods distributed;

(c) Average savings per consumer compared to commercial retail pricing;

(d) Number of Georgia manufacturing jobs created or sustained through program contracts;

(e) Progress toward statewide coverage of essential goods distribution.

GENERAL PROVISIONS

SECTION 4. Appropriations.

(1) For the fiscal year beginning July 1 following the effective date of this act, the following amounts are appropriated from the general fund of the state:

(a) Two hundred fifty million dollars ($250,000,000) to the Georgia Department of Agriculture for the establishment and operation of pilot food assurance centers under this Act;

(b) Fifty million dollars ($50,000,000) to the Georgia Department of Economic Development for the essential goods program established under this Act.

(2) Total initial appropriation: three hundred million dollars ($300,000,000), representing approximately eight-tenths of one percent (0.8%) of the fiscal year 2027 state budget of $36.6 billion [SOURCE: Office of the Governor of Georgia, FY2027 budget signed May 12, 2026; Fox5 Atlanta; CBS News].

THE FOOD PROGRAM TARGET. The at-cost food and commodity assurance program established in this Act, serving Georgia's population of approximately 11,302,748 residents [SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, 2025 population estimate], requires approximately $3.49 billion per year at production cost ($309 per person per year for a base list of twenty-five staple food items at thirty percent of the lowest retail price, per the USDA Food Dollar Series farm-share methodology [SOURCE: USDA Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series]). Against Georgia's fiscal year 2027 state budget of approximately $36.6 billion, this represents approximately 9.5 percent. The $300 million initial appropriation above is startup funding; the full program scales over five years.

THE FISCAL CONVERGENCE. The arithmetic says ending the gap costs a single-digit percentage of the markup the state already pays. The operational template has run for one hundred fifty-nine (159) years inside the same federal apparatus the state already funds. Georgia is not asked to attempt something untested. Georgia is asked to deliver to its own residents what its veterans at Fort Eisenhower, Fort Stewart, Robins Air Force Base, Fort Moore, Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base, and Moody Air Force Base have received since 1867.

(3) The Office of Planning and Budget shall prepare a five-year fiscal projection for full program implementation, including projected savings from reduced SNAP administration costs, reduced Medicaid emergency room utilization, and reduced chronic disease burden attributable to improved material security outcomes.

THE FEDERAL SNAP COST-SHIFT. Federal H.R. 1 (2025) increased the state share of SNAP administrative costs from fifty percent to seventy-five percent, effective October 1, 2026 [SOURCE: Public Law 119-21]. Georgia currently routes SNAP benefits 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]. At at-cost routing through this Act, approximately 95 cents of every dollar reaches the recipient as food (production cost plus a surcharge not exceeding five percent), a 3.9-fold increase in delivered food value per SNAP dollar that independently offsets the federal cost-shift.

THE FISCAL LOCK. The argument that Georgia cannot afford this Act is refuted by the state's existing expenditure on the less efficient version of the same function, while absorbing a federal SNAP cost-shift the state did not request. The fiscal question is not whether to spend. It is whether to continue spending several times as much as required to accomplish the same objective. For a legislature holding the authority, the arithmetic, and the documented need, denial is no longer neutral.

SECTION 5. Severability.

If any provision of this act or the application thereof to any person or circumstance is held invalid, such invalidity shall 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 declared to be severable.

SECTION 6. Repealer.

All laws and parts of laws in conflict with this act are repealed.

SECTION 7. Effective date.

This act shall become effective upon the Governor's approval or upon its becoming law without such approval.

REFERENCES

The research and citations underlying this act are drawn from the Historical Apoplexy series (Cooper, 2025-2026), a ten-paper academic work, and from the peer-reviewed literature cited in the legislative declaration. Principal sources include:

FOOD AND COMMODITY ECONOMICS: - USDA Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series (annual) - Penck, A. (1925). Earth carrying capacity calculations - Cooper, I. (2025). "The Mathematics of Abundance: Two Proofs That Scarcity Is a Policy Choice" - Cooper, I. (2025). "Stolen Futures: The Intergenerational Theft of Technical Possibility" - Galbraith, J.K. (1958). The Affluent Society - Veblen, T. (1921). The Engineers and the Price System - Fresco, J. (2007). Designing the Future - Cohen, J.E. (1995). How Many People Can the Earth Support? - Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book V - 10 U.S.C. Section 2484 (Military Commissary Act)

HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT: - Suetonius. The Lives of the Twelve Caesars (Life of Augustus) - Cassius Dio. Roman History - Tabula Alimentaria from Veleia, CIL XI 1147 (bronze inscription, Parma Museum) - Nature Ecology & Evolution (2024). Mabu Co Tibetan Plateau sedentary-settlement study - Brinkhuis, H. et al. (2006). Episodic fresh surface waters in the Eocene Arctic Ocean, Nature 441 (the Azolla Event)

PUBLIC HEALTH AND HIERARCHY: - Marmot, M. (2004). The Status Syndrome - Marmot, M.G. et al. (1991). Whitehall II Study, The Lancet - Sapolsky, R.M. (2017). Behave - Sapolsky, R.M. (1994). Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers - Shively, C.A. et al. (2009). Social Stress and Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis - Blackburn, E. & Epel, E. (2017). The Telomere Effect

CIVIL RIGHTS AND GEORGIA HISTORY: - King, M.L. Jr. (1964). Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech - King, M.L. Jr. (1967). "Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?" - King, M.L. Jr. (1968). Poor People's Campaign

END OF BILL

Georgia Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act

Eleventh State Adaptation Historical Apoplexy Series (Cooper, 2025-2026)

"Dr. King told us the gradient was violence. Science proved him right. This bill is the remedy."

Prepared by The Amanuensis May 2026

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Verification notes & full source chain

Constitutional path: Legislative path only.

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 Georgia.

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.