New Mexico Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act

            THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF NEW MEXICO
                      2027 Regular Session

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                       SENATE BILL ____

BY __________ (Introduced by request)

CONCERNING THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A STATE PROGRAM FOR FOOD, RESOURCE, AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE TO ENSURE THE MATERIAL SECURITY OF ALL NEW MEXICANS, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, ENACTING NEW SECTIONS OF THE NMSA 1978 RELATING TO CHAPTER 76, MAKING APPROPRIATIONS, AND PROVIDING EFFECTIVE DATES.

                          A BILL FOR AN ACT

LONG TITLE

AN ACT CONCERNING THE CREATION OF THE NEW MEXICO FOOD, RESOURCE, AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE ACT, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, ENACTING NEW SECTIONS OF THE NMSA 1978 TO BE NUMBERED AND COMPILED IN CHAPTER 76 (AGRICULTURE), ESTABLISHING THE NEW MEXICO FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE PROGRAM; DECLARING LEGISLATIVE FINDINGS ON THE PUBLIC HEALTH EVIDENCE THAT JUSTIFIES THE PROGRAM; MAKING APPROPRIATIONS FROM THE GENERAL FUND, FROM THE LAND GRANT PERMANENT FUND DISTRIBUTIONS, AND FROM OIL AND GAS SEVERANCE TAX REVENUE; AND PROVIDING FOR EFFECTIVE DATES AND IMPLEMENTATION SCHEDULES.

LEGISLATIVE ROUTING NOTE

New Mexico does not have a statewide citizen initiative process for statutes. This bill must pass the Legislature, the Senate and the House of Representatives, to become law.

FILING: A bill may be introduced by any member of the Senate or the House of Representatives. Bills are filed with the Chief Clerk of the respective chamber. This bill would be designated "SB ____" if introduced in the Senate or "HB ____" if introduced in the House of Representatives.

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENT: Upon introduction, this bill would likely be assigned to the Senate Conservation Committee or the House Agriculture, Acequias and Water Resources Committee, with a referral to the Senate Finance Committee or the House Appropriations and Finance Committee on the appropriations and the use of Land Grant Permanent Fund distributions.

FISCAL IMPACT: The Legislative Finance Committee (LFC) prepares fiscal impact reports for all bills with budgetary implications. The LFC's analysis would evaluate the bill's interaction with the Land Grant Permanent Fund distribution and oil and gas severance tax revenue.

FLOOR VOTE: Simple majority in each chamber (22 of 42 Senators; 36 of 70 Representatives). Governor's signature or veto override (two-thirds of each chamber).

SESSION: The Legislature of the State of New Mexico convenes annually on the third Tuesday of January. Regular sessions in odd-numbered years are limited to sixty (60) calendar days. Regular sessions in even-numbered years are limited to thirty (30) calendar days and are restricted to budgetary matters, appropriations, revenue bills, and matters designated by the Governor. A bill of this scope would require a sixty-day session (odd year) or a special session called by the Governor. The 2027 Regular Session is a sixty-day session.

ANNUAL BUDGET: The State of New Mexico operates on an annual budget with a fiscal year running July 1 through June 30. Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed an $11.1 billion general fund budget for FY 2027 on March 11, 2026, a 2.5 percent increase over the prior fiscal year [SOURCE: Office of the Governor of New Mexico, March 11, 2026; New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee, 2027 Recommendations]. New Mexico is the second-largest oil-producing state in the nation. Oil and gas revenue provided 34.5 percent of state revenue in 2023 (NMOGA). The Permian Basin in southeastern New Mexico (Lea and Eddy counties) accounts for 95 percent of the state's oil production. This oil dependence creates both fiscal opportunity and vulnerability: when oil prices are high, the state has surplus; when they decline, the budget contracts. This Act reduces the state's vulnerability to oil price volatility by establishing infrastructure that persists regardless of extraction revenue cycles.

THE LAND GRANT PERMANENT FUND: The Land Grant Permanent Fund (LGPF), administered by the New Mexico State Investment Council, holds more than $31.897 billion in total assets, making it one of the largest permanent funds in the United States and the largest educational endowment in New Mexico. The LGPF distributes approximately $1.34 billion annually to public schools, universities, and other beneficiaries. The fund is derived from lands granted by the United States to the Territory of New Mexico under the Ferguson Act of 1898 and additional lands granted by the Enabling Act of 1910. Revenue comes primarily from oil, gas, and mineral royalties on state trust lands. The fund exists to serve New Mexico's people, particularly its children. New Mexico ranks last in the nation in child well-being (Annie E. Casey KIDS COUNT). The fund is the fiscal mechanism for this Act.

LEGISLATIVE FRAMEWORK: The Legislature of the State of New Mexico is a bicameral body consisting of the Senate (42 members) and the House of Representatives (70 members). New Mexico is unique among American states: a majority-minority state with the highest percentage of Hispanic residents in the nation (47 percent), twenty-three sovereign tribal nations (19 Pueblos, the Navajo Nation, Mescalero Apache, Jicarilla Apache, and Fort Sill Apache), constitutional bilingual status (English and Spanish), and a history that predates Plymouth Colony by ten years. Santa Fe, founded in 1610, is the oldest state capital in the United States. The Pueblos have been continuously inhabited for over one thousand years. The state hosts the scientific infrastructure that split the atom, built the bomb, and tested it on its own soil, while ranking last in the nation in child well-being. The Legislature that governs the state where nuclear weapons are designed should be the Legislature that ensures the residents living alongside those facilities have food, water, and the essentials of daily life.

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 written for Colorado and sidelined during the 2016-2017 legislative cycle. The present version is the New Mexico adaptation, incorporating updated research from the Historical Apoplexy series (Cooper, 2025- 2026), a ten-paper academic work providing the evidentiary foundation for this legislation. New Mexico is the twenty-sixth state in this legislative series.

LEGISLATIVE DECLARATION

Be it enacted by the legislature of the state of New Mexico:

SECTION 1. Legislative findings and declaration.

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

    FINDINGS RELATING TO THE STRUCTURAL IMPERATIVE FOR STATE
    ACTION:

    (a0) The federal government has shut down twenty-two (22) times
    since 1976. The 2025 shutdown ran forty-three (43) days, the
    longest in United States history, and furloughed approximately
    670,000 federal employees. The House of Representatives has been
    frozen at 435 members by the Permanent Apportionment Act of
    1929; each member now represents approximately 762,000
    constituents, the worst representation ratio in the OECD. Senate
    cloture motions totaled forty-nine (49) between 1917 and 1970
    and now exceed two thousand (2,000) per decade. Federal H.R. 1
    (2025) shifted SNAP administrative costs from a fifty (50)
    percent to a seventy-five (75) percent state share, effective
    October 1, 2026, and the same Act is projected to reduce New
    Mexico general fund revenue by $211.4 million in FY2027 through
    corporate income tax changes alone [SOURCE: New Mexico Taxation
    and Revenue Department, December 2025]. The federal machine is
    structurally overloaded (Cooper, Paper VII, 2026). New Mexico
    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 claim that government
    cannot be restructured to function is refuted by working
    models. The Swiss Federal Council has operated as a seven-member
    collective executive with a rotating presidency since 1848, one
    hundred seventy-eight (178) years, and reports citizen trust
    above eighty (80) percent. The Roman Republic ran a two-consul
    executive for 482 years. The New Mexico Legislature is itself
    a structural reform instrument: a bicameral body able to enact
    durable infrastructure where the federal government, by its own
    documented overload, cannot. The argument is not that
    government is impossible. It is that the federal layer is
    overloaded and the state layer is not. Denial is no longer
    neutral;

    (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. Kirtland Air Force Base, White Sands Missile Range, Holloman Air Force Base, and Cannon Air Force Base operate this template on New Mexico soil today, and Los Alamos National Laboratory is a parallel institutional-scaffolding precedent in the federal scientific establishment;

    (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, 13.5 percent of United States
    households experienced food insecurity in 2023, and 5.1 percent
    experienced very low food security. In 2023, an estimated
    twenty-three (23) percent of New Mexico children experienced
    food insecurity, above the national average of nineteen (19)
    percent, ranking the state among the worst in the nation for
    childhood hunger (NM Department of Health IBIS; NM Legislature
    LHHS Committee, 2023);

    (b) New Mexico's vast geography, the fifth-largest state by
    area at 121,590 square miles with only 2,130,256 residents,
    creates natural food deserts across immense distances. When
    population is sparse and terrain is mountainous or desert,
    the nearest grocery store may be sixty (60) or one hundred
    (100) miles distant. The Navajo Nation in northwestern New
    Mexico, the Pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley, and the Hispano
    villages of northern New Mexico face food access challenges
    compounded by terrain, distance, and infrastructure that the
    state has never adequately addressed;

    (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 through
    approximately 236 commissary stores worldwide, delivering
    savings of 17 to 25 percent below civilian retail prices
    (CONUS) to approximately 2.8 million authorized users. 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;

    THE NUCLEAR PARADOX, NEW MEXICO'S DEFINING FRAME:

    (f) Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), where the atomic
    bomb was designed and built during the Manhattan Project
    (1943-1945) under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer,
    operates with an annual budget of $5.28 billion (FY 2025
    Economic Impact Report, released January 27, 2026) and
    employs 16,487 people excluding contractors. LANL's
    primary mission is nuclear weapons stewardship. The laboratory
    is a major economic driver, spending nearly $3 billion in New
    Mexico annually. Los Alamos County, essentially a company
    town for nuclear weapons science, has among the highest
    median household incomes, highest educational attainment, and
    best health outcomes in the state. The federal government
    allocates unlimited resources for nuclear weapons design and
    maintenance ON NEW MEXICO SOIL;

    (g) Sandia National Laboratories, headquartered at Kirtland
    Air Force Base in Albuquerque and operated by National
    Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia (a subsidiary
    of Honeywell), performs weapons engineering (the non-nuclear
    components of nuclear weapons), defense systems research,
    energy research, and cybersecurity. Sandia employs
    approximately 15,000 people with FY 2025 spending of
    approximately $5.2 billion (Albuquerque Journal, October
    2025; Sandia Facts and Figures lists gross DOE budget
    authority of approximately $5.77 billion for the same year).
    Together, LANL and Sandia represent over $10 billion in
    annual federal investment in nuclear weapons infrastructure
    on New Mexico soil;

    (h) The Trinity test, the first nuclear detonation in human
    history, occurred on July 16, 1945, at White Sands Missile
    Range in the Jornada del Muerto basin of southern New Mexico.
    Communities downwind of the test site, the Tularosa Basin
    Downwinders, many of them Hispanic families who had lived in
    the region for generations, were exposed to radioactive
    fallout. For eighty (80) years, these families experienced
    elevated rates of cancer, birth defects, and illness while
    the federal government denied responsibility. The Tularosa
    Basin Downwinders were excluded from the Radiation Exposure
    Compensation Act (RECA) for decades. Compensation was finally
    authorized in 2025. The first atomic test was sited above
    rural Hispanic communities in the desert, and the federal
    government did not acknowledge the resulting cancer,
    birth-defect, and illness burden for eighty years;

    (i) The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad is
    the nation's deep geological repository for transuranic
    nuclear waste from weapons production. New Mexico
    stores the nuclear waste that other states' weapons programs
    produce. White Sands Missile Range is one of the largest
    military installations in the United States by area. Holloman
    Air Force Base (Alamogordo) conducts fighter training and
    drone operations. Cannon Air Force Base (Clovis) houses Air
    Force Special Operations. Kirtland Air Force Base hosts the
    Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center. Military commissaries at
    Kirtland, Holloman, Cannon, and White Sands provide at-cost
    food to military families while McKinley County children go
    hungry. The nuclear weapons complex has unlimited budget.
    The state has among the highest child poverty rates in the
    nation. Same federal government funding both;

    (j) LANL's annual budget of $5.28 billion exceeds the total
    amount the Land Grant Permanent Fund distributes annually to
    all public schools and universities in New Mexico ($1.34
    billion). The federal government spends nearly four times as
    much on nuclear weapons design at a single laboratory as
    New Mexico's largest educational endowment distributes to the
    entire state's education system. This is a priority question
    rather than a resource question. The capital exists; it is
    allocated to warheads. This Act proposes that New Mexico
    allocate comparable infrastructure capital to the food and
    commodity assurance of its residents;

    FINDINGS RELATING TO THE WATER PARADOX:

    (k) Approximately thirty (30) percent of the Navajo Nation
    population does not have access to clean, reliable drinking
    water (Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources). In the
    San Juan River Basin, more than a third of Navajo Nation
    households must haul water to their homes (U.S. Bureau of
    Reclamation, 2021). Los Alamos National Laboratory has
    reliable water infrastructure funded by the federal
    government. The same state, the same aquifers, different
    gradient positions. If the federal laboratory has reliable
    water, the reservation can have reliable water. Navajo
    families haul water in barrels in 2026, in the state where
    the Trinity test was conducted. The gradient documented in
    Whitehall and Sapolsky has a physical analogue in New
    Mexico's water infrastructure;

    FINDINGS RELATING TO THE LAND GRANT PERMANENT FUND:

    (l) The Land Grant Permanent Fund holds more than $31.897
    billion in assets generated primarily by oil, gas, and mineral
    royalties from state trust lands (New Mexico Department of
    Finance and Administration, September 2024). The fund
    distributes approximately $1.34 billion annually. The capacity
    exists; this is a distribution question, not a resource
    question (Cooper, Paper III, 2025). The fund
    exists to serve the people of New Mexico. New Mexico ranks
    last in the nation in child well-being for the fourth
    consecutive year (Annie E. Casey KIDS COUNT), with child
    poverty among the highest in the nation. Increased
    utilization of the fund's returns for food and material
    security serves the purpose for which the fund was created;

    FINDINGS RELATING TO FOOD SOVEREIGNTY AND THE ACEQUIA
    TRADITION:

    (m) New Mexico's Pueblos have practiced food sovereignty for
    over one thousand years, irrigated agriculture in the Rio
    Grande Valley, corn, beans, and squash (the Three Sisters),
    and drought-adapted farming developed over millennia. The
    Hispano acequias, community-managed irrigation ditches
    inherited from Spanish and Pueblo traditions, are a living
    example of community-controlled resource distribution: water
    shared by community governance, not market allocation.
    Acequias are governed by elected mayordomos, maintained by
    communal labor (the annual limpia, ditch cleaning), and
    allocate water by community governance at cost. New Mexico
    law protects acequia rights (NMSA 1978, Chapter 73, Article
    2). The acequia IS this Act's philosophy in water form,
    community-controlled, at-cost, governed by shared
    responsibility, not profit. This Act does not import a
    foreign concept to New Mexico. It scales what New Mexico has
    been doing for centuries;

    FINDINGS RELATING TO MANUFACTURING CAPACITY AND ABUNDANCE:

    (n) In 1925, geographer Albrecht Penck of the University of
    Berlin calculated that Earth could sustain eight (8) billion
    people when the world population was approximately two (2)
    billion. The United States has possessed sufficient productive
    capacity for universal material abundance since approximately
    1965-1970, over fifty-five (55) years. The United States
    possesses approximately 293,000 manufacturing establishments
    with the capacity to produce 19.5 to 29.3 times the consumer
    goods required for universal provision. Approximately
    seventy-seven (77) percent of this capacity operates below
    full utilization (Cooper, "The Mathematics of Abundance,"
    2025; Federal Reserve Industrial Production data). This
    constitutes the "Factory Proof", material scarcity in the
    United States is maintained through pricing and distribution,
    not productive limitation;

    (o) The grocery industry operates approximately 47.9 million
    food-insecure Americans alongside $32 billion in unmet need,
    which represents 6.5 percent of annual food markup. This
    constitutes the "Grocery Proof", the cost of feeding every
    food-insecure American is a rounding error on the existing
    food economy;

    THE LAND GRANT WOUND:

    (p) Hispanic families who held land for two hundred or more
    years under Spanish and Mexican land grants, deeded property
    held since before the American nation existed, had their
    holdings reduced or eliminated after the United States took
    New Mexico in 1848 under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. On
    June 5, 1967, Reies Lopez Tijerina led the Alianza Federal
    de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) to storm the
    Tierra Amarilla courthouse in Rio Arriba County to arrest the
    district attorney, free detained Alianza members, and raise
    awareness of the land grant movement. The land grant question
    is a property-rights matter, not an abstract historical
    grievance. Families who held deeded title for centuries were
    dispossessed under American legal process after 1848. This
    Act addresses material security that was lost through that
    process, not merely absent through circumstance;

    FINDINGS RELATING TO EXTRACTION ECONOMICS:

    (q) New Mexico is the second-largest oil-producing state in
    the nation. Crude oil production grew from approximately 100
    million barrels in 2010 to approximately 745 million barrels
    in 2024. Oil and gas revenue provided 34.5 percent of state
    revenue in 2023 (NMOGA). The Permian Basin in southeastern
    New Mexico (Lea and Eddy counties) accounts for 95 percent
    of the state's oil production. Only 6 percent of oil is
    refined in-state, down from 52 percent in 2000. The wealth
    is extracted in southeastern New Mexico. The poverty persists
    in McKinley County, on the Pueblos, in the Hispano villages
    of the north. Same extraction pattern as coal in West
    Virginia, oil in Louisiana, agriculture in Mississippi, the
    resource is extracted, the revenue flows to Santa Fe and
    federal coffers, and the communities outside the extraction
    zone remain poor;

    (r) The state that produces 745 million barrels of oil
    annually, that hosts $9 billion in nuclear weapons
    laboratories, that sits on a $31.897 billion permanent fund,
    ranks last in the nation in child well-being. The question
    was never resources. It was always priorities;

    FINDINGS RELATING TO THE URANIUM MINING LEGACY:

    (s) The Grants Mineral Belt in western New Mexico was the
    center of uranium mining from the 1940s through the 1980s,
    producing ore for Cold War nuclear weapons. Navajo uranium
    miners were recruited to extract the ore that built America's
    nuclear arsenal. These miners developed lung cancer and other
    diseases at catastrophic rates. The federal government
    extracted uranium from Navajo land, used Navajo labor, built
    nuclear weapons, and left cancer behind. The Radiation
    Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) provided some compensation,
    but many miners and their families were excluded or
    inadequately compensated. Hundreds of abandoned uranium mines
    remain on Navajo land and throughout the Grants Mining
    District, contaminating water and soil. The EPA continues
    cleanup efforts decades later. Same extraction pattern as
    coal, oil, plantation agriculture, different mineral, same
    hierarchy, same communities bearing the cost;

    FINDINGS RELATING TO HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT:

    (s1) THE HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT. New Mexico spent
    $5.28 billion at Los Alamos in FY2025 to maintain nuclear
    weapons while twenty-three (23) percent of its children went
    hungry. The proposition that a government cannot afford to feed
    its population is refuted by the historical record. Augustus
    formalized the annona civica around 27 BC: monthly grain
    distribution to approximately 200,000 Roman citizens, treated
    as civic infrastructure in the same category as roads and
    aqueducts, funded at a fraction of military expenditure. The
    program ran more than four hundred (400) years. Augustus was a
    tyrant who had roughly 300 senators proscribed; Suetonius
    records (Life of Augustus 27) that he ordered a Roman knight
    named Pinarius stabbed on the spot for the offense of taking
    notes at a public assembly. Even a ruler who would kill a man
    for taking notes understood that hungry citizens are broken
    infrastructure. The emperor Nerva extended the model with the
    alimenta, state-funded rural loans whose interest financed
    nutrition for orphaned and destitute children; the Tabula
    Alimentaria from Veleia (CIL XI 1147) records the loan amounts
    and child-support payments on a bronze inscription that still
    exists and can be visited at the Parma Museum. At Mabu Co on the
    Tibetan Plateau, sedentary abundance was sustained 4,400 years
    ago at 14,587 feet using fishing hooks (Yang et al., Nature
    Ecology and Evolution, 2024). The Azolla Event proved that a
    single freshwater fern species edited Earth's entire atmosphere
    over 800,000 years (Brinkhuis et al., Nature 441, 2006). The
    records converge: one hundred fifty-nine (159) years of
    continuous commissary statute, four hundred years of annona
    archaeology, and forty-nine million years of biological geology
    all establish that provisioning a population at cost is solved
    engineering, not speculation (Cooper, Papers III, V, and VIII).
    New Mexico has the nuclear budget. It does not yet have the
    food budget;

    (s2) THIS ACT IS NOT GOVERNMENT OWNERSHIP. This Act does not
    nationalize New Mexico agriculture. Chile farms stay private.
    Pecan orchards in the Mesilla Valley stay private. Ranches stay
    private. Processing and trucking stay private. This Act is not
    the model of a city-owned and city-operated grocery store such
    as the Mamdani proposal in New York City; it redirects tax
    expenditure the state is already making, SNAP and related
    dollars, through at-cost distribution centers that contract
    with private New Mexico producers. The state operates a retail
    point at production cost plus a five (5) percent surcharge, the
    identical model the commissaries at Kirtland Air Force Base and
    White Sands Missile Range have run since 1867 without acquiring
    a single farm, and the private membership-based volume model
    that Costco has run profitably for decades. Currency survives
    for everything above the base list: luxury, custom, specialty,
    and premium goods remain entirely within the private market.
    The Act provides a floor, not a ceiling, and not a replacement
    for the market economy;

    (s3) THE AUTOMATION ARGUMENT, ANSWERED PRE-EMPTIVELY. The
    objection that this Act threatens distribution jobs inverts the
    actual sequence. The retail collapse and autonomous freight are
    already eliminating those jobs without this Act. Aurora runs
    driverless freight on the Dallas-to-Houston corridor today.
    More than 15,000 retail store closures were projected for 2025,
    and humanoid systems from Figure and Agility are in commercial
    warehouse deployment now. In a state where the nearest grocery
    store can be one hundred (100) miles away, each closure cuts
    deeper (Cooper, Paper IV, 2025). This Act does not cause that
    displacement. It catches the displaced worker: the food and
    commodity assurance program feeds the household when the wage
    ends. The commissary employs
    truckers, warehouse staff, and clerks; the at-cost model
    removes the retail markup, not the distribution labor. Adam Smith warned in
    1776 that a worker confined to a few simple operations loses
    the capacity to adapt; this Act is the structure that protects
    that worker when the operation itself disappears;

THE NEW MEXICO FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE PROGRAM

SECTION 2. A new section of the NMSA 1978, to be compiled in Chapter 76, is enacted to read:

76-__-1. SHORT TITLE.

This article may be cited as the "New Mexico Food and Commodity Assurance Act."

76-__-2. DEFINITIONS.

As used in this article:

    (1) "at-cost distribution" means the provision of food and
    essential commodities at the actual cost of production,
    transportation, and handling, without retail markup, profit
    margin, or speculative pricing;

    (2) "department" means the department of agriculture or the
    department's designee;

    (3) "commissary model" means the distribution methodology
    established by the Military Commissary Act of 1867 (10 U.S.C.
    Section 2484) and continuously operated for one hundred
    fifty-nine (159) years by the defense commissary agency,
    providing food and household goods at cost to authorized users;

    (4) "acequia model" means the community-controlled,
    at-cost resource distribution methodology practiced by New
    Mexico's acequias for over four hundred (400) years, governed
    by elected mayordomos, maintained by communal labor, and
    allocating resources by community governance rather than
    market pricing;

    (5) "essential commodities" means food, household goods,
    personal hygiene products, and other goods necessary for daily
    living, as determined by the department;

    (6) "program" means the New Mexico food and commodity
    assurance program established by this article;

    (7) "resource library" means a publicly maintained inventory
    of goods, tools, equipment, and materials available for
    community use through the Fresco Resource Library model
    (Jacque Fresco, The Venus Project, 2007), categorizing all
    material goods in three tiers by permanence: Tier 1, constant
    (food, consumables, hygiene products: replenished continuously);
    Tier 2, semi-permanent (clothing, linens, small electronics:
    replaced periodically); Tier 3, permanent (tools, equipment,
    vehicles, durable goods: maintained and shared through lending
    libraries, workshops, makerspaces, seed libraries, and
    cooperative processing facilities).

76-__-3. NEW MEXICO FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE PROGRAM, ESTABLISHMENT.

    (1) There is established the New Mexico food and commodity
    assurance program within the department of agriculture to
    provide at-cost food and essential commodity distribution to
    all residents of New Mexico.

    (2) The program shall:

    (a) establish and operate distribution centers throughout New
    Mexico, with priority placement in areas designated as food
    deserts, in communities with food insecurity rates exceeding
    the state average, and in Navajo Nation chapter houses, Pueblo
    community centers, and Hispano villages where infrastructure
    gaps are most acute;

    (b) distribute food and essential commodities at actual cost
    of acquisition, processing, and distribution, without retail
    markup;

    (c) prioritize procurement from New Mexico agricultural
    producers, including small-scale farmers, acequia-irrigated
    operations, Pueblo agricultural cooperatives, Navajo ranchers,
    and cooperative processing facilities, with a goal of sourcing
    not less than forty (40) percent of food products from
    in-state producers within five (5) years;

    (d) coordinate with federal food assistance programs including
    the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP), the
    special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants,
    and children (WIC), and the commodity supplemental food
    program to maximize benefit stacking for New Mexico residents;

    (e) establish mobile distribution units for service to remote
    communities where fixed distribution centers are not
    economically feasible, recognizing that New Mexico's vast
    distances and sparse population require distributed logistics;

    (f) develop partnerships with the University of New Mexico,
    New Mexico State University, New Mexico Tech, the state's
    tribal colleges (Dine College, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic
    Institute, the Institute of American Indian Arts), Northern
    New Mexico College, and the state's community college system
    to provide nutrition education and food preparation training
    alongside distribution;

    (g) establish resource libraries in each distribution region
    operating in three tiers as defined in subsection (7) of
    Section 76-__-2;

    (h) incorporate the acequia model's governance principles,
    community-elected leadership, communal maintenance
    responsibility, at-cost allocation, into the program's
    distribution center governance structure;

    (i) include water infrastructure development as a program
    component, recognizing that food security requires water
    security, and that thirty (30) percent of the Navajo Nation
    population lacks access to clean, reliable drinking water.

    (3) The department shall promulgate rules for implementation
    within one hundred eighty (180) days of the effective date
    of this article.

    (4) TRIBAL SOVEREIGNTY PROVISIONS:

    (a) Nothing in this article shall diminish, alter, or
    supersede the sovereignty or self-governance of any tribal
    nation within New Mexico;

    (b) Participation by tribal nations in the program is
    voluntary and shall be governed by government-to-government
    consultation between the state and each participating tribal
    nation;

    (c) Tribal nations may establish their own distribution
    centers under this program, governed by tribal law and
    administered by tribal government, with state funding
    provided through intergovernmental agreements;

    (d) The department shall consult with all twenty-three (23)
    tribal nations in New Mexico, the nineteen (19) Pueblos
    (Acoma, Cochiti, Isleta, Jemez, Laguna, Nambe, Ohkay
    Owingeh, Picuris, Pojoaque, San Felipe, San Ildefonso,
    Sandia, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo (Kewa), Taos,
    Tesuque, Zia, and Zuni), the Navajo Nation, Mescalero Apache
    Tribe, Jicarilla Apache Nation, and Fort Sill Apache Tribe,
    prior to implementing any program component that would affect
    tribal lands or tribal members.

76-__-4. FUNDING.

    (1) The program shall be funded through:

    (a) annual appropriations from the general fund;

    (b) a portion of oil and gas severance tax revenue collected
    under Chapter 7 of the NMSA 1978, redirecting resource
    extraction revenue toward resource provision infrastructure;

    (c) increased distribution from the Land Grant Permanent
    Fund, consistent with the fund's constitutional purpose of
    serving the people of New Mexico;

    (d) federal grants and matching funds available through the
    United States Department of Agriculture and related programs;

    (e) revenue from at-cost distribution operations (covering
    operational costs, not generating profit);

    (f) donations, bequests, and other contributions.

    (2) The Legislature finds that the Land Grant Permanent Fund
    holds more than $31.897 billion in assets while New Mexico
    children experience among the highest poverty rates in the
    nation. The fund was created to serve the people. The state
    ranks last in the nation in child well-being. Increased
    distribution serves the fund's purpose.

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THE PUBLIC HEALTH EVIDENCE

WHY THIS ACT FEEDS NEW MEXICANS BEYOND BARE SURVIVAL

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SECTION 3. Legislative findings; the public health evidence.

    The food and commodity assurance program established in
    Section 2 of this Act is not charity, and it is not the
    provision of calories alone. The Legislature finds that the
    public health record sets out why a state feeds its residents
    past the point of bare survival, and that this evidence is the
    standing justification on which the program rests:

    (a) THE GRADIENT IS THE DISEASE. New Mexico's public health
    crisis is not a failure of individual behavior. It is the
    physiological expression of hierarchical position within a
    stratified society. The Whitehall Studies (Marmot, 1967-present)
    tracked 10,308 British civil servants, all employed, all
    insured, none in absolute poverty, and found the lowest grade
    carried three (3) times the mortality of the highest. Sapolsky's
    three decades of Serengeti baboon research, Shively's macaque
    studies tracing subordination through a cingulate cortex
    serotonin pathway, and Blackburn's Nobel Prize-winning telomere
    work establish the same mechanism in two further species and at
    the cellular level. 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. This
    is why a food and commodity assurance program is a structural
    intervention and not a charitable one: universal healthcare
    did not eliminate the Whitehall gradient, and caloric
    sufficiency did not eliminate the macaque gradient. A program
    that places food, at cost, within reach of every resident
    flattens one rung of the gradient itself rather than treating
    sickness downstream of it (Cooper, Paper V, 2026);

    (b) The Los Alamos-to-McKinley County gradient represents
    the most extreme within-state health and wealth disparity in
    the United States. Los Alamos County, nuclear weapons
    scientists with exceptional healthcare, schools, and
    infrastructure. McKinley County, Navajo and Zuni communities
    with poverty rates exceeding thirty (30) percent, food
    insecurity among the highest in the nation, and communities
    without running water. The gradient spans two hundred (200)
    miles and potentially twenty (20) or more years of life
    expectancy within the same state;

    (c) New Mexico has the highest alcohol-related death rate in
    the nation, 79.3 per 100,000 population in 2023, fifty-six
    (56) percent above the national rate (NM Department of
    Health). This is the cortisol cascade mediated through
    alcohol. Cultural dislocation, poverty, intergenerational
    trauma, and geographic isolation produce systematic
    self-medication;

    (d) The boarding school era, in which the federal government
    and religious institutions forcibly removed Native children
    from their families and communities to boarding schools
    designed to destroy their language, culture, and identity
    ("Kill the Indian, save the man", Captain Richard Henry
    Pratt), produced intergenerational trauma that manifests
    as substance abuse, suicide, and broken family structures
    generations later. The Santa Fe Indian School, established
    in 1890, was part of this system. It has since been reclaimed
    by the nineteen Pueblos and is now a tribally controlled
    school. The trauma that era produced is heritable and ongoing,
    and remains a public health burden the state still carries;

    (e) The Tularosa Basin Downwinders breathed fallout from a
    nuclear test the federal government denied for eighty years.
    Generations of cancer, birth defects, and illness followed.
    Compensation was finally authorized in 2025, eighty years
    after the Trinity test. The health consequences of the nuclear
    weapons complex are not hypothetical in New Mexico. They are
    documented, multigenerational, and still being treated;

    (f) Navajo uranium miners recruited for Cold War weapons
    production in the Grants Mineral Belt developed lung cancer
    and other diseases at catastrophic rates. The federal
    government extracted uranium from Navajo land, used Navajo
    labor, built nuclear weapons, and left cancer behind. Hundreds
    of abandoned uranium mines remain, contaminating water and
    soil. The hierarchy extracted the mineral and left the disease;

    (g) The COVID-19 pandemic devastated the Navajo Nation in New
    Mexico, the highest per-capita infection rate in the United
    States at its peak. No running water meant no handwashing.
    Overcrowded multigenerational housing accelerated
    transmission. Elders died at disproportionate rates, taking
    language, ceremony, and intergenerational knowledge with
    them. The pandemic exploited the infrastructure gap the
    hierarchy created;

    (h) New Mexico's suicide rate is consistently among the
    highest in the nation. Youth suicide in Native communities
    constitutes a crisis. Case and Deaton's "deaths of despair"
    map directly onto New Mexico's demographic reality. Deaths
    of despair in a state with nuclear weapons laboratories;

    (i) New Mexico is the fifth-largest state by area with only
    2.1 million people. Some communities are over one hundred
    (100) miles from the nearest hospital. The commissary model's
    logistics, designed for delivery to dispersed, remote
    military installations, is the distribution model that
    New Mexico's geography requires;

    (j) BOWLES AND GINTIS NAMED THE RIGHT DISEASE AT THE WRONG
    SITE. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, in Schooling in
    Capitalist America (1976), correctly identified socioeconomic
    stratification but incorrectly isolated the education system
    as its primary reproduction mechanism. Stratification is the
    ocean, not the cup. The gradient is the disease; schools are
    downstream of it. Hierarchy itself kills, and the gradient
    runs through every institution: housing, diet, language,
    healthcare, employment, criminal justice. The redlining maps
    drawn by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation in 1935 still
    predict food-desert status in American cities today. Targeting
    any single institution misses the structural mechanism
    (Cooper, "The Targeting Error," 2026). The teachers in McKinley
    County did not build the gradient. They did not cause the
    reservation infrastructure gap, the boarding school legacy, or
    the uranium contamination. They work inside the gradient with
    the tools they have. The hidden curriculum they deliver,
    sharing, patience, cooperation, conflict resolution, is not a
    weapon of class reproduction. It is mothering at scale.

GENERAL PROVISIONS

SECTION 4. Funding mechanisms.

    (1) This Act shall be funded through:

    (a) Annual appropriations from the general fund. The
    Legislature finds that the enacted FY 2027 general fund budget
    of $11.1 billion [SOURCE: Office of the Governor of New Mexico,
    March 11, 2026], supported by recurring revenue estimated at
    approximately $13.9 billion, provides fiscal capacity for
    phased implementation;

    (b) Increased distribution from the Land Grant Permanent
    Fund. The LGPF holds more than $31.897 billion in assets and
    currently distributes approximately $1.34 billion annually.
    The Legislature finds that increased distribution, consistent
    with the constitutional purpose of the fund and with prudent
    management of the fund's corpus, is appropriate when the
    fund's beneficiaries include children experiencing the highest
    poverty rate in the nation;

    (c) A portion of oil and gas severance tax revenue, redirecting
    extraction revenue toward human development infrastructure.
    New Mexico is the second-largest oil-producing state. Oil and
    gas provided 34.5 percent of state revenue in 2023. Directing
    a portion of this revenue to the program established by this
    Act reduces the state's vulnerability to oil price volatility
    by building infrastructure that persists regardless of
    extraction cycles;

    (d) Federal grants and matching funds;

    (e) Operational revenue from at-cost distribution under this
    Act;

    (f) The Legislature finds that the current fiscal trajectory,
    child well-being ranked last in the nation, the highest
    alcohol-related death rate in the nation, and a permanent fund
    designed to serve children who are among the poorest in the
    nation, constitutes a fiscal emergency. This Act is fiscal
    survival, not new spending. The cost of NOT implementing this
    Act is measured in child poverty rates and deaths of despair.

    (2) SESSION PROVISIONS: A bill of this scope requires a
    sixty-day session (odd year) or a special session called by
    the Governor. The 2027 Regular Session is a sixty-day session.
    If introduced in a thirty-day session (even year), the
    Governor must designate it for consideration.

SECTION 5. Phased implementation.

    (1) Implementation of the food and commodity assurance program
    established in Section 2 shall begin within one (1) year of the
    effective date. Initial distribution centers shall be
    established in the ten (10) counties with the highest food
    insecurity rates, with priority given to McKinley, Cibola, San
    Juan, Rio Arriba, and Bernalillo counties.

    (2) Full statewide coverage shall be achieved within five (5)
    years of the effective date, with mobile distribution units
    serving remote communities where fixed distribution centers
    are not economically feasible.

SECTION 6. Downwinder and uranium miner acknowledgment.

    (1) The Legislature acknowledges that the State of New Mexico
    bears a unique burden as the site of the first nuclear weapons
    test in human history and the location of the nation's primary
    nuclear weapons design and production facilities;

    (2) The health consequences of the Trinity test, uranium
    mining, and continued nuclear weapons operations are
    documented, multigenerational, and ongoing;

    (3) This Act addresses the material and public health
    consequences of the nuclear weapons complex's presence on New
    Mexico soil, consequences borne disproportionately by Hispanic
    and Native communities.

    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. This state
    currently routes SNAP benefits through commercial retailers
    where 75.7 cents of every food dollar pays for markup rather
    than food. Under this Act's at-cost routing, approximately
    95 cents of every dollar reaches the recipient as food
    (production cost plus five percent surcharge), a 3.9-fold
    increase in delivered food value per SNAP dollar that
    independently offsets the federal cost-shift.

    FOOD PROGRAM TARGET. The at-cost food assurance program
    established by this Act serves New Mexico's
    population of approximately 2,130,256 residents [SOURCE: U.S.
    Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 estimate]. At the base-minimum
    fiscal table of $309 per person per year, covering twenty-five
    (25) core staple items at thirty (30) percent of cheapest
    retail price per the USDA Food Dollar Series farm-share
    methodology, the program requires approximately $658.2 million
    per year at production cost ($309 multiplied by 2,130,256
    residents equals $658,249,104). Against New Mexico's enacted
    FY2027 general fund of $11.1 billion [SOURCE: Office of the
    Governor of New Mexico, March 11, 2026], this represents
    approximately 5.93 percent. New Mexico's per-capita general
    fund spend of approximately $5,211 per resident supports the
    base minimum with substantial margin. The full baseline of
    thirty-seven (37) staple items at $609 per person per year,
    approximately $1.30 billion or 11.69 percent of the general
    fund, is established as the program's expansion goal once the
    base minimum is operational.

    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. New Mexico is not asked to attempt
    something untested. New Mexico is asked to deliver to its own
    residents what its veterans at Kirtland Air Force Base,
    Holloman Air Force Base, Cannon Air Force Base, and White Sands
    Missile Range have received since 1867.

    THE FISCAL LOCK. The argument that New Mexico cannot afford
    this Act is refuted by the state's existing expenditure on the
    less efficient version of the same programs while absorbing a
    federal SNAP cost-shift the state did not request. New Mexico
    runs a $31.897 billion permanent fund, hosts more than $9
    billion in annual federal nuclear-weapons investment on its
    soil, and produced 745 million barrels of oil in 2024. The
    fiscal question is not whether the resources exist. It is
    whether the state will continue spending four times as much as
    required to accomplish the same objective. Denial is no longer
    neutral.

SECTION 7. 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 the
    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 8. Effective date.

    The provisions of this Act shall take effect on July 1
    following enactment.

REFERENCES

The research and citations supporting this Act are drawn from the following published sources:

STRATIFICATION AND HEALTH: - Marmot, M. (2004). The Status Syndrome. - Marmot, M. 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. - Case, A. & Deaton, A. (2015). Deaths of Despair. - Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Capitalist America. [Targeting error corrected per Cooper, Paper V.] - Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (2002). SCA Revisited.

HISTORICAL AND ARCHAEOLOGICAL PRIMARY SOURCES: - Suetonius. The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Life of Augustus, sec. 27 (the Pinarius incident). Loeb Classical Library. - Appian. The Civil Wars, Book IV (the proscriptions). Loeb Classical Library. - Cassius Dio. Roman History (Nerva and the alimenta). Loeb Classical Library. - CIL XI 1147. Tabula Alimentaria from Veleia. Parma Museum. - Yang, X. et al. (2024). Sedentary lifestyle of early Tibetan Plateau populations at high elevation. Nature Ecology and Evolution, September 2024 (Mabu Co). - Brinkhuis, H. et al. (2006). Episodic fresh surface waters in the Eocene Arctic Ocean. Nature 441, pp. 606-609 (Azolla Event).

FEDERAL POLICY: - H.R. 1, 119th Congress (2025). SNAP administrative cost-shift to the states, effective October 1, 2026.

ABUNDANCE AND ECONOMICS: - Penck, A. (1925). Earth carrying capacity calculations. - USDA Economic Research Service. Food Dollar Series. - Galbraith, J.K. (1958). The Affluent Society. - Veblen, T. (1899). The Theory of the Leisure Class. - Fuller, R.B. (1969). Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. - Fresco, J. (2007). Designing the Future.

HISTORICAL APOPLEXY FRAMEWORK: - Cooper, I. (2025). Historical Apoplexy (Paper I). - Cooper, I. (2026). Historical Arc (Paper II). - Cooper, I. (2025). The Mathematics of Abundance (Paper III). - Cooper, I. (2025). Stolen Futures (Paper IV). - Cooper, I. (2026). The Targeting Error (Paper V). - Cooper, I. (2026). The Resuscitation Document (Paper VI). - Cooper, I. (2026). The Structural Overload (Paper VII). - Cooper, I. (2026). Venus Prime (Paper VIII). - Brinkhuis, H. et al. Nature 441 (2006). Azolla Event. - CIL XI 1147. Tabula Alimentaria from Veleia. Nerva alimenta. - Suetonius. Lives of the Twelve Caesars. Augustus.

NEW MEXICO SPECIFIC: - NM Dept. of Health (2025). Alcohol Use in New Mexico. - LANL Economic Impact Report, FY 2025. - NM State Investment Council. Land Grant Permanent Fund. - Navajo Nation Dept. of Water Resources. - Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium. - NM Oil and Gas Association (NMOGA). - NM Legislative Finance Committee, 2027 Recommendations. - Annie E. Casey Foundation. KIDS COUNT Data Book (2025). New Mexico ranked 50th (last) in child well-being for the fourth consecutive year. - U.S. Census Bureau. American Community Survey. - EPA. Grants Mining District Uranium Mines. - Library of Congress. Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid, 1967. - NMSA 1978, Chapter 73, Article 2 (Acequia Rights).

MILITARY COMMISSARY: - Military Commissary Act of 1867. - 10 U.S.C. Section 2484. - Defense Commissary Agency operational data.

END OF BILL

    New Mexico Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act
    Prepared for the Legislature of the State of New Mexico
    2027 Regular Session (Sixty-Day Session)

    Los Alamos splits atoms. McKinley County hauls water in
    barrels. The annual budget for nuclear weapons design
    exceeds the annual distribution of the state's largest
    permanent fund to its people. The worst child well-being
    ranking in the nation coexists with the infrastructure that
    designs the United States nuclear arsenal.

    The Pueblos have practiced food sovereignty for a thousand
    years. The acequias have governed community resource
    distribution for centuries. The Hispano villages maintained
    culture and knowledge transfer through four hundred years of
    colonial displacement. The Permanent Fund sits at $31.897
    billion while the state ranks last in the nation in child
    well-being.

    The question was never resources. It was always priorities.

    Historical Apoplexy (Cooper), 2025-2026
    The Amanuensis

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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 New Mexico.

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.