Missouri Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act

ONE HUNDRED THIRD GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF MISSOURI Second Regular Session

---

SENATE/HOUSE BILL ____

BY __________ (Introduced by request)

CONCERNING THE ESTABLISHMENT OF STATE PROGRAMS FOR FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE TO ENSURE THE MATERIAL SECURITY OF ALL MISSOURI RESIDENTS, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, ADDING SECTIONS TO CHAPTERS 262 AND 620 OF THE REVISED STATUTES OF MISSOURI, MAKING APPROPRIATIONS, AND PROVIDING EFFECTIVE DATES.

A BILL FOR AN ACT

LONG TITLE

AN ACT CONCERNING THE CREATION OF THE MISSOURI FOOD, RESOURCE, AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE ACT, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, ESTABLISHING THE MISSOURI FOOD ASSURANCE PROGRAM BY ADDING SECTIONS TO CHAPTER 262 OF THE REVISED STATUTES OF MISSOURI; CREATING THE MISSOURI ESSENTIAL GOODS PROGRAM BY ADDING SECTIONS TO CHAPTER 620 OF THE REVISED STATUTES OF MISSOURI; MAKING APPROPRIATIONS; AND PROVIDING FOR EFFECTIVE DATES AND IMPLEMENTATION SCHEDULES.

LEGISLATIVE ROUTING NOTE

Missouri has a citizen ballot initiative process. Under Article III, Section 50 of the Missouri Constitution, citizens may propose legislation by initiative petition. The enacting clause for citizen- initiated statutes is "Be it enacted by the people of the state of Missouri." The signature requirement for initiated state statutes for the 2026 election cycle is 106,384 valid signatures, collected in at least six (6) of Missouri's eight (8) congressional districts, based on the number of votes cast in the last gubernatorial election (Missouri Secretary of State, Initiative Petition Process Overview, 2026 Cycle).

FILING: An initiative petition is filed with the Missouri Secretary of State. Before circulation, the petition text must be submitted to the Secretary of State and the Attorney General for review. The Attorney General prepares a fiscal note and fiscal note summary. The Secretary of State prepares the official ballot title. This process is governed by Article III, Sections 49-53 of the Missouri Constitution and Chapter 116 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri.

PRECEDENT: Missouri voters approved Amendment 2 (Medicaid Expansion) via initiative petition on August 4, 2020, with 53.27 percent of the vote, after the General Assembly had refused to expand Medicaid for seven years. The General Assembly subsequently attempted to withhold appropriations for the expansion, but the Missouri Supreme Court ruled in Doyle v. Tidball (2021) that the constitutional amendment was self- executing and required implementation. This precedent demonstrates that Missouri's initiative process is effective for health and welfare legislation, and that the judiciary will enforce voter-approved initiatives over legislative resistance.

Alternatively, this bill may be introduced through the General Assembly by any member of the Senate or House of Representatives.

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENT: Upon introduction, this bill would likely be assigned to the Senate Agriculture, Food Production, and Outdoor Resources Committee or the House Agriculture Policy Committee. Because it carries an appropriation, it may also be referred to an Appropriations Committee under the rules of the respective chamber.

FISCAL NOTE: The Committee on Legislative Research, Oversight Division, prepares fiscal notes for all bills with budgetary impact under the rules of the Missouri General Assembly.

FLOOR VOTE: Simple majority in each chamber (18 of 34 Senators; 82 of 163 Representatives). Governor's signature or veto override (two-thirds of each chamber).

SESSION: The 103rd General Assembly (2025-2026). Missouri legislative sessions convene on the first Wednesday after the first Monday in January and last until May 30 (Article III, Section 20, Missouri Constitution).

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. 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. Missouri is one of twenty states in this legislative series.

LEGISLATIVE DECLARATION

Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Missouri:

SECTION A. Legislative findings and declaration.

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

FINDINGS RELATING TO THE STRUCTURAL IMPERATIVE FOR STATE ACTION:

(a0) The federal government is structurally overloaded. There have been 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 by the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, producing a ratio of approximately 762,000 constituents per representative, the worst in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Senate cloture motions, 49 in total between 1917 and 1970, now exceed 2,000 per decade. The federal debt ceiling has been raised, extended, or revised 78 times since 1960. Federal legislation is now routinely signed by autopen. Federal H.R. 1 (2025) shifted SNAP administrative costs from a fifty percent to a seventy-five percent state share, effective October 1, 2026, an unfunded obligation transferred to the State of Missouri without its consent (Cooper, Paper VII, 2026). The State of Missouri has the authority to act under its own legislative power rather than await federal action that structural overload prevents;

(a0a) THE MULTI-EXECUTIVE PRECEDENT. The Swiss Federal Council has operated as a seven-member collegial executive with an annually rotating presidency since 1848, one hundred seventy-eight years of continuous constitutional government, and reports citizen trust above eighty percent. The Roman Republic operated under paired consuls for 482 years. Functioning multi-member executive models exist and are documented. The single-executive overload that produces autopen governance and recurring shutdown is a design choice, not a constitutional necessity;

(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 Leonard Wood and Whiteman Air Force Base operate this template on Missouri 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 Feeding America and the Missouri Hunger Atlas 2025 (University of Missouri), 15.4 percent of Missouri households experienced food insecurity in 2023, representing approximately 951,000 Missourians who faced uncertainty in acquiring sufficient food, reduced the quality and variety of their diets, or at times went without food during the year;

(b) The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) served 674,772 Missourians and brought $1,512,570,795 to the state in federal fiscal year 2024 (Food Research and Action Center, SNAP Fact Sheet, Missouri, 2025). These funds are distributed through commercial retailers, where the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service Food Dollar Series establishes that 75.7 cents of every food dollar pays for markup rather than food production;

(c) Missouri's agricultural sector generated $14.7 billion in market value of agricultural products sold (USDA Census of Agriculture, 2022), making Missouri one of the leading agricultural states in the nation with 87,887 farms covering two-thirds of the state's total land acreage. Missouri ranks seventh nationally in soybean production and is a top-ten producer of corn, cattle and calves, hogs, and turkeys (Missouri Department of Agriculture). Food insecurity in Missouri is a distribution problem, not a production problem;

(d) 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;

(e) 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);

(f) 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 across two hundred thirty-six (236) stores worldwide, delivering savings of 17 to 25 percent below civilian retail prices to approximately 2.8 million authorized users. Fort Leonard Wood in Pulaski County, Missouri, operates a Defense Commissary Agency facility providing at-cost groceries to military personnel in one of the most rural, impoverished parts of the state. Whiteman Air Force Base in Johnson County, home of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber fleet, operates a commissary in a county with below-average income and above-average food insecurity. This program is funded by all federal taxpayers but available only to military families and retirees, establishing a proven precedent for government-operated at-cost food distribution;

(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 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). Missouri's manufacturing sector employs approximately 290,700 workers (MU Extension, Missouri Manufacturing Indicators, 2024);

(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 persists in Missouri, where the state's $14.7 billion agricultural output and substantial manufacturing capacity vastly exceed its population's material requirements, yet 951,000 residents are food insecure;

(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 Missouri's productive capacity and its residents' material security reflects this structural dynamic;

(k) Missouri contains the mean center of the United States population. The 2020 Census placed the national population center in Wright County, Missouri, the fifth consecutive decade the center has fallen within the state. The Gateway Arch in St. Louis commemorates the launching point of western expansion. Kansas City sits at the Missouri-Kansas border where East historically met West. The state contains every American economic reality, urban, suburban, rural, agricultural, industrial, Ozark mountain, Mississippi Delta, and Great Plains edge. If a food distribution model works in Missouri, it scales nationally, because Missouri IS the national cross-section;

FINDINGS RELATING TO HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT:

(k1) Augustus formalized the annona civica around 27 BC, a permanent grain distribution to approximately 200,000 Roman citizens, administered as civic infrastructure in the same category as roads and aqueducts. Augustus was, by every account, a tyrant: roughly 300 senators and 2,000 equestrians were proscribed under the Second Triumvirate, and Suetonius records him ordering a Roman knight named Pinarius stabbed on the spot for the offense of taking notes at a public assembly (Suetonius, Life of Augustus 27). Even Augustus, who would have a man killed for taking notes in the wrong room, understood that hungry citizens are broken infrastructure. The annona endured for more than four hundred years. The emperor Nerva extended the model with the alimenta, state-funded rural loans whose interest was redirected to the nutrition of orphaned and destitute children. The Tabula Alimentaria from Veleia (CIL XI 1147), the bronze inscription recording the specific loan amounts and child-support payments, still exists and can be visited at the Parma Museum. At Mabu Co on the Tibetan Plateau, sedentary abundance was achieved approximately 4,400 years ago at 4,446 metres in elevation using fishing hooks and environmental knowledge, a settlement that endured roughly 800 years (Yang et al., Nature Ecology and Evolution, September 2024). The Azolla Event records a single freshwater fern, in symbiosis with the cyanobacterium Anabaena azollae, drawing down enough atmospheric carbon dioxide to help shift the Eocene Arctic from hothouse to icehouse over roughly 800,000 years (Brinkhuis et al., Nature 441, 2006). Three independent records converge: the United States military commissary has distributed food at cost under federal statute for one hundred fifty-nine years, the Roman annona ran more than four hundred, and biological provisioning operates across geologic time. Provisioning a population is not a theory awaiting proof. It is a documented practice;

(k2) This Act does not nationalize Missouri agriculture. Ozark cattle ranches stay private. Bootheel cotton and rice stay private. The Kansas City stockyards stay private. The state purchases at production cost plus a facility surcharge not to exceed five percent and operates the retail point of sale, the same model the Defense Commissary Agency has used since 1867 without acquiring a single farm. This is distinct from the municipal grocery-ownership model advanced by Mayor Mamdani in New York City, in which the city itself owns and operates the stores. Under this Act the upstream supply chain, the farms, processors, and distributors, remains entirely private, and Costco demonstrates the same near-cost, volume-purchase model operating today in the private sector. Currency survives for every good above the staple base list, including all luxury, custom, and specialty goods. This Act establishes a floor, not a ceiling;

(k3) The retail collapse and autonomous freight are already eliminating distribution jobs. Aurora operates driverless freight on the Dallas to Houston corridor today, and more than 15,000 retail store closures were projected for 2025. This Act does not cause that displacement. It provides a floor beneath the workers that displacement strands. Adam Smith warned in 1776 that a worker confined to a few simple operations becomes "as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become." The commissary model still employs truckers, stockers, and clerks. At-cost distribution removes the markup, not the labor;

FINDINGS RELATING TO PUBLIC HEALTH AND HIERARCHY:

(l) 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;

(m) 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);

(n) 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);

(o) 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);

(o1) THE GRADIENT IS THE DISEASE. The Whitehall finding, the Serengeti baboon work, the Wake Forest macaque work, and the Nobel telomere research are four independent research programs, conducted across six decades, in three species, and they converge on a single mechanism. The gap is the gradient, not the deprivation alone. A subordinate rank in a hierarchy produces measurable physiological damage even when food, housing, and medical care are present. Treating sickness downstream of an untreated gradient is documented to fail. Hierarchy itself kills. A food and commodity assurance program is therefore not charity. It is a structural intervention against a documented cause of disease;

(o2) STRATIFICATION IS STRUCTURAL, NOT INSTITUTIONAL. Bowles and Gintis named a real disease at the wrong site. Stratification is the ocean, not the cup. The gradient runs through every institution: housing, wages, health care, food access, and the criminal justice system. No single institution is the engine, and targeting one of them misses the structural mechanism. The corrected reading set out in Cooper, Paper V (2026), is the stronger one because it requires no villain: the gradient is documented, it is society-wide, and it is lethal at every level. A food and commodity assurance program addresses one structural channel of that gradient directly, at production cost, without assigning blame to any institution or profession;

(p) THE DELMAR DIVIDE. Missouri contains one of the most extreme and most studied life expectancy gradients in the United States. In St. Louis, the average life expectancy in ZIP code 63105 (Clayton) is eighty-five (85) years. The average life expectancy in ZIP code 63106 (North St. Louis) is sixty-seven (67) years. These communities are separated by fewer than ten (10) miles, the Delmar Boulevard corridor that has been identified by the Washington University in St. Louis "Segregation in St. Louis: Dismantling the Divide" report as one of the most studied racial and economic dividing lines in America. Eighteen (18) years of life expectancy difference across one boulevard. Same city, same weather, same water supply, same state government. Different floor of the hierarchy. This is the Marmot gradient mapped onto a street address;

(q) FERGUSON. The August 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, prompted a United States Department of Justice pattern-or-practice investigation of the Ferguson Police Department. The DOJ report (March 2015) found that Ferguson's law enforcement practices were "shaped by the City's focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs." In 2012, approximately thirteen (13) percent of Ferguson's municipal budget was funded by fines and fees; by fiscal year 2015 the city had budgeted twenty-three (23) percent of its revenue from that source. The DOJ found that the resulting enforcement burden fell disproportionately on Ferguson's Black residents and documented violations of constitutional rights. The relevance to this Act is structural. A municipal government funded through fines, fees, and warrants operates a documented mechanism of downward economic pressure on the residents least able to absorb it. The hierarchy gradient is not produced only through cortisol and telomeres. It is also produced by policy, through fines, fees, warrants, suspended licenses, and the lost employment and housing that follow. Ferguson is fifteen (15) miles from the Gateway Arch;

(r) TROOST AVENUE. Kansas City exhibits a parallel gradient along Troost Avenue, which has historically served as the city's racial dividing line, a physical artifact of Jim Crow-era redlining. East of Troost: predominantly Black, systematically disinvested. West of Troost: whiter and wealthier. The same gradient, the same health outcomes, the same mechanism documented by Marmot in the Whitehall studies, replicated in both of Missouri's major metropolitan areas;

(s) RURAL HOSPITAL CLOSURES. Missouri has experienced significant rural hospital closures since 2010, leaving entire counties without emergency medical care. The 2024-2025 Health in Rural Missouri Biennial Report (Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services) documents that Missourians in rural counties continue to experience barriers to health at high rates, poor health outcomes, and challenges accessing necessary healthcare services. The Sheps Center at UNC has identified four (4) additional rural Missouri hospitals at immediate risk of closure due to financial strain and high Medicaid payer mixes. Since Missouri expanded Medicaid in 2021, no rural hospitals have closed, but the program remains under threat. When the nearest emergency room is forty-five or more minutes away, the hierarchy kills through geography;

(t) BOOTHEEL HEALTH. Missouri's Bootheel region (Pemiscot, Dunklin, New Madrid, Mississippi, Scott, and Stoddard Counties) exhibits Mississippi Delta poverty and health outcomes inside a midwestern state. Pemiscot County has a poverty rate of 27.4 percent (Missouri Rural Health Report, 2024-2025), nearly six times the rate of St. Charles County (4.7 percent). These communities are three hundred (300) miles from the world-class medical centers of Washington University and BJC HealthCare in St. Louis. The Bootheel produces cotton, rice, and soybeans while its residents are food insecure, the same production-hunger paradox documented in every agricultural region in this series;

(u) These findings collectively establish that poverty and social hierarchy are not merely economic conditions but medical conditions, with documented physiological pathways that produce measurable morbidity and mortality. The Delmar Divide is a single-street Marmot gradient of unusual severity, eighteen years of life expectancy across one boulevard within a single city. A food and commodity assurance program that delivers staple food at production cost is therefore a public health intervention with quantifiable healthcare cost reduction potential. This is the evidentiary basis on which the program established by this Act reaches beyond bare material survival;

(v) TRIBAL ACKNOWLEDGMENT. The General Assembly acknowledges that the land now known as Missouri is the ancestral homeland of the Osage Nation and many other Indigenous peoples, including the Missouria, for whom the state is named, the Illini, the Quapaw, and the Shawnee. Missouri was part of the Trail of Tears route through which the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole peoples were forcibly removed from their homelands. While Missouri currently has no federally recognized tribal reservations, this history of displacement is acknowledged with respect, and the program established in this act shall not diminish any existing or future tribal sovereignty, rights, or claims.

(2) The General Assembly further finds that the food and commodity assurance program established in this act and the public health evidence set out in these findings constitute one integrated rationale. The arithmetic of food provision and the documented physiology of the hierarchy gradient are not separate arguments. The first establishes that the state can deliver staple food to every resident at production cost. The second establishes why doing so is a public health intervention rather than a discretionary expense. The program is enacted on both grounds together.

SECTION 1. Sections 262.900 through 262.935, RSMo, are enacted to read as follows:

262.900. Short title.

Sections 262.900 through 262.935 shall be known and may be cited as the "Missouri Food Assurance Act."

262.905. Definitions.

As used in sections 262.900 through 262.935, 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) "Director" means the director of the department of agriculture.

(3) "Department" means the Missouri Department of Agriculture.

(4) "Food assurance center" means a state-operated facility established under sections 262.900 through 262.935 for the purpose of distributing food products to Missouri 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.

262.910. Missouri food assurance program, creation and purpose.

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

(2) The purpose of the program is to establish state-operated food distribution centers where all Missouri 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 Missouri;

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

(c) Sell food products to Missouri residents at at-cost pricing as defined in section 262.905;

(d) Prioritize procurement from Missouri 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.

262.915. Pilot food assurance centers, locations and timeline.

(1) Within two (2) years of the effective date of sections 262.900 through 262.935, the department shall establish not fewer than six (6) pilot food assurance centers in the following regions:

(a) Two (2) centers in the St. Louis metropolitan area, with at least one center located north of Delmar Boulevard or in a community identified as a food desert by the USDA Economic Research Service;

(b) Two (2) centers in the Kansas City metropolitan area, with at least one center located east of Troost Avenue or in a community identified as a food desert by the USDA Economic Research Service;

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

(d) One (1) center in the Bootheel region, including but not limited to Pemiscot, Dunklin, New Madrid, or Stoddard County.

(2) Within five (5) years of the effective date of sections 262.900 through 262.935, the department shall expand the program to not fewer than twenty-four (24) food assurance centers statewide, with at least one center in each congressional district and at least four (4) centers serving rural 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, and the largest populations residing in food deserts.

262.920. Missouri food assurance fund, creation.

(1) There is hereby created in the state treasury the Missouri 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 sections 262.900 through 262.935.

(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.

262.925. Missouri producer priority.

(1) The department shall establish procurement protocols that prioritize Missouri-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 Missouri 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 Missouri farms, ranches, and cooperatives to provide stable revenue for Missouri agricultural producers and to reduce producer dependence on commodity market price volatility.

262.930. 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 sections 262.900 through 262.935, 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 Missouri 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.

262.935. Existing market preservation.

(1) Nothing in sections 262.900 through 262.935 shall be construed to prohibit, limit, or disadvantage the operation of private grocery retailers, farmers' markets, or cooperative food enterprises in Missouri.

(2) The department shall ensure that food assurance centers complement rather than replace existing food distribution channels and shall coordinate with local agricultural producers to maximize the benefit to Missouri's agricultural economy.

SECTION 2. Sections 620.3000 through 620.3025, RSMo, are enacted to read as follows:

620.3000. Short title.

Sections 620.3000 through 620.3025 shall be known and may be cited as the "Missouri Essential Goods Act."

620.3005. Definitions.

As used in sections 620.3000 through 620.3025, 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 Missouri Department of Economic Development.

620.3010. Missouri essential goods program, creation and purpose.

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

(2) The purpose of the program is to create procurement contracts with Missouri manufacturers to produce and distribute essential goods at below-retail pricing through food assurance centers established under sections 262.900 through 262.935 and through dedicated distribution points established under this section.

(3) The program shall:

(a) Identify essential goods categories suitable for Missouri manufacturing;

(b) Establish guaranteed purchase contracts with Missouri 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 Missouri's manufacturing sector through guaranteed demand contracts.

(4) The United States has approximately 293,000 manufacturing facilities, of which 10,000 to 15,000 would suffice for universal material abundance, representing 19.5 to 29.3 times overcapacity. Missouri's manufacturing sector, employing approximately 290,700 workers, 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).

620.3015. Distribution model, tiered by permanence.

(1) The distribution of essential goods shall be tiered by the permanence of the good and provided according to need:

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

(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 survives for luxury, custom, and specialty goods not covered by the essential goods program.

620.3020. 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 sections 620.3000 through 620.3025, containing:

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

(b) Number and types of essential goods distributed;

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

(d) Number of Missouri manufacturing jobs created or sustained through program contracts.

620.3025. Existing market preservation.

(1) Nothing in sections 620.3000 through 620.3025 shall be construed to prohibit, limit, or disadvantage the operation of private retailers or manufacturers in Missouri.

GENERAL PROVISIONS

SECTION 3. Appropriations.

(1) There is hereby appropriated from the general revenue fund of the state of Missouri the sum of sixty-five million dollars ($65,000,000) for the first fiscal year following the effective date of this act, representing approximately four-tenths of one percent of the state's $15.4 billion general revenue budget for fiscal year 2026 [SOURCE: Office of Governor Mike Kehoe, FY26 State Operating Budget signed June 30, 2025], allocated as follows:

(a) Fifty million dollars ($50,000,000) for the Missouri Food Assurance Program: establishment of the first six pilot food assurance centers, supply chain development, Missouri producer contracting, and initial procurement;

(b) Fifteen million dollars ($15,000,000) for the Missouri Essential Goods Program: manufacturer contracting, distribution infrastructure, and initial procurement of essential goods.

(2) The Director of the Division of Budget and Planning shall submit revised appropriations requests annually based on program performance data and expansion timelines.

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: H.R. 1, 2025]. Missouri currently routes SNAP benefits through commercial retailers, where the United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service Food Dollar Series establishes that 75.7 cents of every food dollar pays for markup rather than food production [SOURCE: USDA ERS Food Dollar Series, 2023]. Routed at cost through the food assurance program, approximately 95 cents of every dollar reaches the recipient as food, that is, production cost plus a facility surcharge not to exceed five percent. The increase in delivered food value per SNAP dollar independently offsets the federal cost-shift.

THE FOOD PROGRAM TARGET. The at-cost food assurance program established in this act, serving Missouri's population of approximately 6.27 million residents [SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 population estimate], is projected at approximately $1.94 billion per year at production cost. That figure applies the Table 2 base-staple rate of $309 per person per year, a twenty-five-item core-staple baseline priced at thirty percent of cheapest retail under USDA Food Dollar Series methodology [SOURCE: USDA ERS Food Dollar Series, 2023]. Per-capita state spending, measured on the $15.4 billion general revenue operating fund, is approximately $2,456, which places Missouri in the lower fiscal tier and selects the Table 2 rate. The $1.94 billion target is approximately 12.6 percent of the $15.4 billion general revenue budget, or approximately 3.8 percent of the $50.8 billion total state operating budget. The fuller Table 1 baseline of $609 per person, approximately $3.82 billion, is retained as the program expansion goal once at-cost distribution reaches statewide scale.

THE FISCAL CONVERGENCE. The arithmetic says that closing the food gap costs a single-digit percentage of the markup the state and its residents already pay above production cost. The operational template has run for one hundred fifty-nine years inside the same federal apparatus that Missouri taxpayers already fund: the Defense Commissary Agency has sold food at cost since 1867 [SOURCE: 10 U.S.C. Section 2484]. Fort Leonard Wood and Whiteman Air Force Base operate that model on Missouri soil today. Missouri is not asked to attempt something untested. Missouri is asked to deliver to its own residents what its veterans have received since 1867.

THE FISCAL LOCK. The argument that Missouri cannot afford this act is refuted by the state's existing expenditure on the less efficient version of the same provision while it absorbs a federal SNAP cost-shift it did not request. The fiscal question is not whether to spend. It is whether to continue spending several times what production cost requires to accomplish the same objective. Denial is no longer neutral.

SECTION 4. Severability.

If any provision of this act or the application thereof to any person or circumstance is held to be unconstitutional or otherwise invalid, such invalidity shall not affect other provisions or applications of this act that 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 5. Effective date.

(1) This act shall take effect on August 28 following its passage and approval by the Governor, or on the date specified for citizen-initiated statutes in Article III, Section 51 of the Missouri Constitution if enacted through the initiative petition process.

(2) The implementation schedules established in this act shall commence on the effective date.

REFERENCES

The research and citations supporting this act are drawn from the following primary and secondary sources:

FOOD AND COMMODITY ECONOMICS: - USDA ERS Food Dollar Series (2023) - USDA Census of Agriculture (2022) - Missouri Department of Agriculture, Top Commodities - Feeding America, Map the Meal Gap (2023) - Missouri Hunger Atlas 2025 (University of Missouri) - Food Research and Action Center, SNAP Fact Sheet, Missouri (2025) - Military Commissary Act of 1867 / 10 U.S.C. Section 2484 - Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA) operations data - Penck, A. (1925). Earth carrying capacity calculations - Cohen, J. (1995). "How Many People Can the Earth Support?" - Galbraith, J.K. (1958). "The Affluent Society" - Veblen, T. (1921). "The Engineers and the Price System" - Cooper, I. (2025). "The Mathematics of Abundance" - Federal Reserve, manufacturing capacity utilization data - MU Extension, Missouri Manufacturing Indicators (2024) - Missouri Enterprise, 2024 Missouri Manufacturing Report

HIERARCHY AND HEALTH: - Marmot, M. (2004). "The Status Syndrome" - Marmot, M. (2015). "The Health Gap" - Marmot, M.G. et al. (1991). Whitehall II study, The Lancet - Sapolsky, R.M. (2017). "Behave" - Sapolsky, R.M. (2004). "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" - Shively, C.A. et al. (2009). Social Stress and Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis, Obesity - Blackburn, E. & Epel, E. (2017). "The Telomere Effect" - Washington University in St. Louis, "Segregation in St. Louis: Dismantling the Divide" (2018) - STLPR (2015). "Segregation Is 'Literally Killing Us'" - U.S. DOJ (2015). Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department - Missouri DHSS (2024-2025). Health in Rural Missouri Biennial Report - Missouri Community Action Network, Missouri Poverty Facts (2023)

STRUCTURAL AND ECONOMIC THOUGHT: - Smith, A. (1776). "The Wealth of Nations," Book V - Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976). "Schooling in Capitalist America" - Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (2002). "Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited," Sociology of Education

MISSOURI-SPECIFIC: - Office of Governor Mike Kehoe, FY26 State Operating Budget (signed June 30, 2025) - Missouri Office of Administration, FY2026 Executive Budget - Missouri Amendment 2, Medicaid Expansion Initiative (August 2020) - Doyle v. Tidball (2021), Missouri Supreme Court - Missouri Secretary of State, Initiative Petition Process (2026 Cycle) - Fort Leonard Wood Commissary, Defense Commissary Agency - Whiteman Air Force Base, Johnson County, Missouri

HISTORICAL APOPLEXY (Cooper): - Cooper, I. (2025). Paper I: Concept Definition - Cooper, I. (2025). Paper III: The Mathematics of Abundance - Cooper, I. (2025). Paper IV: Stolen Futures - Cooper, I. (2026). Paper V: The Targeting Error - Cooper, I. (2026). Paper VII: The Structural Overload - Cooper, I. (2026). Paper VIII: Venus Prime

END OF BILL

Missouri Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act One Hundred Third General Assembly State of Missouri

"Augustus understood that hungry citizens are broken infrastructure. Missouri grows food for the nation while its own Bootheel goes hungry. Scarcity is a policy choice. This act makes the other one."

---

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 Missouri.

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.