North Carolina Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act

     GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF NORTH CAROLINA
                    SESSION 2025

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                    HOUSE/SENATE BILL ____

BY __________ (Introduced by request)

CONCERNING THE ESTABLISHMENT OF STATE PROGRAMS FOR FOOD AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE TO ENSURE THE MATERIAL SECURITY OF ALL NORTH CAROLINA RESIDENTS, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, AMENDING CHAPTERS 106 AND 143B OF THE NORTH CAROLINA GENERAL STATUTES, MAKING APPROPRIATIONS, AND PROVIDING EFFECTIVE DATES.

                         AN ACT

LONG TITLE

AN ACT CONCERNING THE CREATION OF THE NORTH CAROLINA FOOD, RESOURCE, AND COMMODITY ASSURANCE ACT, AND, IN CONNECTION THEREWITH, ESTABLISHING THE NORTH CAROLINA FOOD ASSURANCE PROGRAM BY ADDING ARTICLE 55 TO CHAPTER 106 OF THE GENERAL STATUTES; CREATING THE NORTH CAROLINA ESSENTIAL GOODS PROGRAM BY ADDING ARTICLE 27 TO CHAPTER 143B OF THE GENERAL STATUTES; MAKING APPROPRIATIONS; AND PROVIDING FOR EFFECTIVE DATES AND IMPLEMENTATION SCHEDULES.

LEGISLATIVE ROUTING NOTE

North Carolina does not have a citizen ballot initiative process. This bill must be introduced by a member of the North Carolina General Assembly, either the Senate (50 members) or the House of Representatives (120 members). The General Assembly convenes in odd-numbered years for a long session and in even-numbered years for a short session.

COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENT: Upon introduction, this bill would likely be assigned to the Senate Agriculture, Energy, and Environment Committee or the House Agriculture Committee, with a referral to the Senate or House Appropriations Committee on the appropriations and the use of state funds. Because the bill carries fiscal provisions, it may be referred jointly.

FISCAL NOTE: The General Assembly's Fiscal Research Division prepares fiscal notes for all bills with budgetary impact.

FLOOR VOTE: Simple majority in each chamber (26 of 50 Senators; 61 of 120 Representatives). Governor's signature or veto override (three-fifths of each chamber).

SESSION: The 2025-2026 Session of the North Carolina General Assembly. North Carolina operates on a biennial budget cycle, with the fiscal year running July 1 through June 30.

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.

LEGISLATIVE DECLARATION

The General Assembly of North Carolina enacts:

SECTION 1. Legislative findings and declaration.

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

    FINDINGS RELATING TO THE STRUCTURAL IMPERATIVE FOR STATE
    ACTION:

    (a0) Twenty-two federal government shutdowns since 1976,
    including a forty-three-day shutdown in 2025. The House frozen
    at 435 since 1929; 762,000 constituents per representative,
    worst in the OECD. Federal H.R. 1 (2025) shifted SNAP
    administrative costs from fifty percent to seventy-five percent
    state share. The federal machine is structurally overloaded
    (Cooper, Paper VII, 2026). This State has the authority to act
    under its own legislative power without awaiting the federal
    action that structural overload prevents;

    (a0a) Multi-executive government is not theoretical. The Swiss
    Federal Council has governed Switzerland through a seven-member
    council with a rotating annual presidency since 1848, one
    hundred seventy-eight years of continuous operation, and reports
    citizen trust above eighty percent. The Roman Republic divided
    its executive between two annually elected consuls for
    approximately four hundred eighty-two years. A single federal
    executive who signs legislation by autopen is the recent
    departure from the historical norm, not the norm itself (Cooper,
    Paper VII, 2026). North Carolina need not wait on a federal
    structure that no functioning multi-executive precedent would
    recognize;

    (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) Food insecurity in North Carolina reached fifteen percent
    (15%) in 2023, its highest level in nearly twenty years
    (Feeding America, Map the Meal Gap 2025). The Food Research and
    Action Center reports 1,613,717 North Carolinians receiving
    Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, with
    approximately $2.94 billion in SNAP benefits flowing to the
    State annually (FRAC, North Carolina SNAP Fact Sheet, 2025).
    More than 607,000 people face food insecurity in central and
    eastern North Carolina alone (Feeding America, 2025);

    (b) North Carolina's agricultural sector generates approximately
    $13 billion in annual cash receipts from farm marketings (USDA
    Economic Research Service; NC Department of Agriculture and
    Consumer Services, 2024 Agricultural Statistics), ranking among
    the top ten agricultural states. North Carolina ranks second
    nationally in hog production and third in poultry production.
    The state's productive capacity vastly exceeds its population's
    food requirements. Food insecurity in North Carolina is a
    distribution problem, not a production problem;

    (c) The United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research
    Service Food Dollar Series establishes that the farm share of the
    United States food dollar is 24.3 cents, with the remaining 75.7
    cents allocated to processing, transportation, wholesale, retail,
    and food service markup. Total United States food-at-home spending
    is approximately $1.09 trillion; production cost is approximately
    $213 to $327 billion. The difference of approximately $496 billion
    represents markup above production cost;

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

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

    (f) Fort Bragg, the largest United States Army installation by
    population, with more than 52,000 active-duty military
    personnel, approximately 12,600 reserve components and temporary
    duty students, more than 8,700 civilian employees, and
    approximately 63,000 active-duty family members, operates a
    full commissary system on North Carolina soil, serving tens of
    thousands of families at below-retail cost.
    Robeson County, located approximately thirty (30) miles from
    Fort Bragg, carries the highest poverty rate of any county in
    North Carolina, with roughly forty percent (40%) of its
    children living below the poverty line (North Carolina Budget
    and Tax Center, Robeson County Economic Snapshot; Data USA
    county profile).
    The same tax dollars that fund the Fort Bragg commissary are paid
    by Robeson County residents who cannot access it. Marine Corps
    Base Camp Lejeune, with approximately 47,000 Marines and
    dependents, operates a second commissary system in Jacksonville,
    surrounded by eastern North Carolina communities with among the
    highest food insecurity rates in the state. North Carolina has
    the fourth largest active-duty military population in the nation
    (NC Military Affairs Commission). The precedent for government-
    operated at-cost food distribution is proven, funded, and
    operating at massive scale on North Carolina soil;

    (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
    establishments. A single medium-sized factory can supply basic
    consumer goods for 10,000 to 50,000 people; the number required
    for 335 million Americans is 10,000 to 15,000, 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);

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

    (j) The economist John Kenneth Galbraith described in "The
    Affluent Society" (1958) the condition of "private opulence and
    public squalor", the coexistence of enormous private productive
    capacity with inadequate public provision of basic needs. This
    condition persists in North Carolina, where Research Triangle
    Park, the largest research park in the United States, generates
    billions in economic activity while eastern North Carolina counties
    east of Interstate 95 experience persistent poverty, food deserts,
    and population decline;

    (k) The economist Thorstein Veblen documented in "The Engineers
    and the Price System" (1921) the deliberate restriction of
    production capacity by business interests to maintain prices above
    production cost, a practice he termed the "conscious withdrawal
    of efficiency." North Carolina's agricultural infrastructure was
    built for tobacco, a crop that killed its consumers for over a
    century. R.J. Reynolds in Winston-Salem, the American Tobacco
    Company in Durham, and Liggett in Durham dominated the state
    economy. When the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (1998) and
    declining smoking rates collapsed the industry, western North
    Carolina pivoted to technology through the Research Triangle.
    Eastern North Carolina, where the tobacco was grown, cured, and
    the workers lived, received nothing. The tobacco buyout provided
    payments to individual farmers but did not rebuild communities.
    The agricultural infrastructure, the land, the labor knowledge,
    the processing facilities, still exists. It grew a product that
    killed people. This Act redirects that infrastructure to grow
    food that feeds people;

    FINDINGS RELATING TO HISTORICAL AND BIOLOGICAL PRECEDENT:

    (k1) North Carolina grew tobacco for centuries and built an
    infrastructure around it. Augustus formalized the annona civica
    for roughly 200,000 Romans, grain as infrastructure, the same
    category as roads. Suetonius (Life of Augustus 27) records the
    same Augustus ordering a knight named Pinarius stabbed on the
    spot at a public assembly for the offense of taking notes. A man
    who would kill over a written word still understood that a
    hungry city is broken infrastructure. The annona ran more than
    400 years. Nerva extended it to child nutrition, recorded on a
    bronze tablet at Veleia, the Tabula Alimentaria, CIL XI 1147,
    which still exists and can be visited at the Parma museum. At
    Mabu Co in Tibet, sedentary abundance was achieved 4,400 years
    ago at 14,587 feet with fishing hooks (Nature Ecology and
    Evolution, 2024). The Azolla Event records one freshwater fern
    editing Earth's atmosphere across 800,000 years (Brinkhuis et
    al., Nature 441, 2006). Three independent records converge: a
    federal commissary statute operating 158 years, annona
    archaeology spanning four centuries, and biological geology
    spanning 49 million years (Cooper, Papers III and VIII,
    2025-2026). The objection that at-cost provision cannot endure
    does not survive the record. North Carolina is the
    second-largest hog producer and third-largest poultry producer
    in the nation. The food exists. The question is who eats it;

    (k2) This Act does not place North Carolina agriculture under
    government ownership. Hog operations in Duplin and Sampson
    counties stay private. Poultry processors stay private. Sweet
    potato farms stay private. The State does not take over farms,
    processors, or distributors.
    This is not the municipal-grocery model, in which a city owns
    and operates the store, as proposed by New York City Mayor
    Zohran Mamdani. This Act redirects existing tax expenditure,
    the SNAP dollars the State already routes, through at-cost
    distribution centers that contract with private producers,
    exactly as the Defense Commissary Agency has contracted with
    private suppliers since 1867, and on the same near-cost
    volume-pricing logic the private membership warehouse Costco
    operates today. The State purchases at production cost plus a
    five percent surcharge, the same model the commissaries at Fort
    Bragg and Camp Lejeune have run since 1867 without acquiring a
    single farm. Currency survives for everything above the base
    list. The bill is a floor, not a ceiling, and not a replacement
    for the market;

    (k3) The retail collapse and autonomous freight are already
    eliminating distribution jobs. Aurora runs driverless freight
    between Dallas and Houston today. More than 15,000 retail store
    closures were projected for 2025. Rural eastern North Carolina
    grocery access was already fragile. The bill does not cause this
    displacement. The bill catches the displaced worker: the food
    and commodity assurance program feeds the household when the
    wage ends. The companion North Carolina Education Modernization
    Act, drafted separately, will address the developmental
    pipeline question. The commissary
    still employs truckers, stockers, and clerks. At-cost provision
    removes the markup, not the labor. Adam Smith warned in 1776 of
    exactly this worker, the one whose whole life is spent performing
    a few simple operations and who, without public provision for
    education, is left with nothing when the operation ends;

    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, located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina,
    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). This research was conducted on North
    Carolina soil, at a North Carolina university, proving on
    North Carolina ground that hierarchy causes heart attacks;

    (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);

    (p) North Carolina contains two radically different health
    economies within a single state. Duke University Medical Center
    in Durham and UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill are world-class medical
    institutions. Eastern North Carolina has experienced rural hospital
    closures, healthcare deserts, and provider shortages (UNC Sheps
    Center for Health Services Research). There is more than a ten-year
    difference in life expectancy between North Carolina counties with
    the longest and shortest lifespans (NC State Center for Health
    Statistics, 2021-2023). The Marmot gradient runs east-to-west
    across the state;

    (q) Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune's drinking water was
    contaminated with toxic chemicals from 1953 through 1987, more
    than thirty years (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease
    Registry, ATSDR). Marines, their families, and civilian employees
    were exposed to volatile organic compounds including
    trichloroethylene, tetrachloroethylene, benzene, and vinyl
    chloride. The government that operates the commissary system
    poisoned its own service members on the same installation. If
    the system can fail the people it claims to protect most, Division
    II addresses the structural health failures that Camp Lejeune
    made undeniable;

    (r) Eastern North Carolina communities living near industrial hog
    operations experience elevated rates of respiratory illness,
    waterborne disease, and environmental contamination from hog waste
    lagoons (Environmental Defense Fund; NC Department of Environmental
    Quality). North Carolina has approximately 9 million hogs on
    approximately 2,100 farms, concentrated in the eastern counties
    (USDA NASS, December 2024). The communities carrying this
    environmental and health burden are predominantly rural and
    lower-income. Marmot and Sapolsky explain why these communities
    show elevated cortisol, cardiovascular disease, and shortened
    lifespans;

    (s) North Carolina expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care
    Act in December 2023, after years of legislative resistance. By
    April 2024, more than 400,000 North Carolinians had enrolled in
    Medicaid expansion coverage (NC Department of Health and Human
    Services, 2024). This Act does not depend on Medicaid; it
    addresses the root causes that Medicaid treats symptomatically;

    (t) The gap is the gradient, not the deprivation. Treating
    sickness downstream of an untreated status gradient is documented
    to fail across four research programs, six decades, and three
    species: British civil servants, Serengeti baboons, and Wake
    Forest macaques. Hierarchy itself kills (Cooper, Paper V, 2026).
    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. Food and commodity assurance programs therefore
    constitute public health interventions, not charity, with
    quantifiable healthcare cost reduction potential;

    FINDINGS RELATING TO PROGRAM SCOPE AND ARCHITECTURE:

    (u) THE UNIVERSE 25 REBUTTAL. The General Assembly finds that
    material provision without social, educational, and
    developmental infrastructure does not constitute abundance for
    a social species. John B. Calhoun's "Universe 25" experiment
    (1973) is frequently cited as evidence that abundance causes
    social collapse. This citation is a misreading. The mice in
    Universe 25 never had abundance. They had inventory, food in a
    box. That is not abundance for a complex social species. A
    human infant with unlimited food but no social contact does
    not thrive, it dies or develops permanent cognitive damage, as
    documented in isolation studies, feral children cases, and
    institutional deprivation research. Calhoun himself identified
    in his later work that the collapse was caused by the
    breakdown of social roles, not by material provision. He
    called it the "behavioral sink." The social structure failed
    because it was never designed. The United States military
    commissary has operated for one hundred fifty-nine (159) years
    with no "behavioral sink", because it exists inside a system
    that provides education, healthcare, social roles, conflict
    resolution, intergenerational knowledge transfer, and
    governance. The Defense Commissary Agency is Universe 25 with
    institutional infrastructure, and the institutional
    infrastructure is what makes the difference. The companion
    North Carolina Education Modernization Act, drafted separately
    and addressing the developmental pipeline question, will
    address the institutional architecture in detail; the food and
    commodity assurance program established by this Act, operating
    at-cost on the same commissary template, is the material floor
    that any such institutional architecture rests on;

    (u1) BOWLES AND GINTIS NAMED THE RIGHT DISEASE AT THE WRONG
    SITE. Bowles and Gintis (1976) correctly identified that
    socioeconomic stratification is reproduced across generations
    but incorrectly isolated the education system as its primary
    reproduction mechanism. Stratification is the ocean, not the
    cup. The gradient is the disease; schools, hospitals, and
    workplaces are downstream of it. Hierarchy itself kills
    (Cooper, Paper V, 2026), and the gradient runs through every
    institution. Treating any single institution as the cause
    misses the structural mechanism. The health gradient
    documented by Marmot, Sapolsky, Shively, and Blackburn, not
    the classroom, is where the stratification does its lethal
    work, and a food and commodity assurance program is therefore
    a public health instrument aimed at the mechanism itself. The
    teachers in Robeson, Halifax, and Bertie counties did not
    build the gradient. They work inside it 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;

    (ii) North Carolina's total state budget for the 2025-2027
    biennium includes approximately $32.6 billion in net General Fund
    appropriations for fiscal year 2026 (NC General Assembly Fiscal
    Research Division; John Locke Foundation, 2025). North Carolina's
    individual income tax rate for taxable year 2025 is 4.25 percent
    (flat rate) (NC Department of Revenue, Session Law 2023-134).
    North Carolina currently distributes approximately $2.94 billion
    annually in SNAP benefits through commercial retailers, where
    75.7 cents of every food dollar pays markup, not food
    production;

    (jj) 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), developed the
    original version of this proposal for the State of Colorado in
    2016. SMRF was founded by Imran Stanton Cooper with the express purpose
    of training citizens in legislative drafting, policy analysis, and
    democratic participation. The present legislation represents the
    updated version of that 2016 proposal, incorporating research
    from the Historical Apoplexy series (Cooper, 2025-2026);

    (2) The General Assembly further finds that the food and
    commodity assurance program established in this Act is a
    material floor, modeled on the United States military
    commissary that has run continuously since 1867 and now codified
    at 10 U.S.C. Section 2484, and that the public health evidence
    set out above, the Whitehall gradient, the Sapolsky and Shively
    primate research, the Blackburn telomere work, and the North
    Carolina-specific health and environmental data, establishes
    that food and commodity assurance reaches the same physiological
    mechanism that produces measurable morbidity and mortality in
    North Carolina populations. The legislature that has read this
    arithmetic and this evidence and declines to act has not chosen
    prudence; it has chosen the more expensive failure. Denial is no
    longer neutral.

SECTION 2. Chapter 106 of the General Statutes is amended by adding a new Article 55 to read:

ARTICLE 55 North Carolina Food Assurance Program

106-850. Short title.

    This Article shall be known and may be cited as the "North
    Carolina Food Assurance Act."

106-851. Definitions.

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

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

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

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

    (4) "Food assurance center" means a State-operated facility
    established under this Article for the purpose of distributing
    food products to North Carolina 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.

    (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, Designing the Future, 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). The implementation
    schedule and operational provisions for a statewide resource
    library are addressed in the companion North Carolina Public
    Service and Resource Library Act, drafted separately.

106-852. North Carolina food assurance program, creation, purpose.

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

    (2) The purpose of the program is to establish State-operated food
    distribution centers where all North Carolina 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, and
    as demonstrated at Fort Bragg, Camp Lejeune, Seymour Johnson
    Air Force Base, and Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point on
    North Carolina soil.

    (3) The program shall:

        (a) Establish and operate food assurance centers throughout
        the State of North Carolina;

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

        (c) Sell food products to North Carolina residents at at-cost
        pricing as defined in G.S. 106-851;

        (d) Prioritize procurement from North Carolina farms to the
        maximum extent practicable, with specific emphasis on
        transitioning former tobacco-producing land in eastern North
        Carolina to food production;

        (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.

106-853. Pilot food assurance centers, locations, timeline.

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

        (a) Two (2) centers in the Charlotte metropolitan area;

        (b) One (1) center in the Research Triangle region (Raleigh-
        Durham-Chapel Hill);

        (c) One (1) center in the Triad region (Greensboro-Winston-
        Salem-High Point);

        (d) One (1) center in Robeson County, prioritizing proximity
        to Lumbee Tribe communities in and around Pembroke;

        (e) One (1) center in the eastern North Carolina coastal
        plain, including but not limited to Halifax, Bertie, or
        Tyrrell County;

        (f) One (1) center in the western North Carolina mountain
        region, prioritizing proximity to the Qualla Boundary
        (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians).

    (2) Within five (5) years of the effective date of this Article,
    the Department shall expand the program to not fewer than
    twenty-five (25) food assurance centers statewide, with at least
    one center in each of North Carolina's fourteen (14) congressional
    districts and at least five (5) centers serving rural communities
    east of Interstate 95 as defined by the Department.

    (3) The Department shall prioritize locations with the highest
    rates of food insecurity, the greatest distances to existing
    grocery retail, the largest populations residing in food deserts,
    and communities with demonstrable hurricane vulnerability.

    (4) Food assurance centers shall be designed to function as
    emergency distribution points during hurricane and disaster
    events, integrated with the North Carolina Division of Emergency
    Management under G.S. Chapter 166A.

106-854. North Carolina food assurance fund, creation.

    (1) There is hereby created in the State treasury the North
    Carolina food assurance fund.

    (2) The fund shall consist of:

        (a) Moneys appropriated by the General Assembly;

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

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

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

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

    (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.

106-855. North Carolina producer priority, tobacco-to-food transition.

    (1) The Department shall establish procurement protocols that
    prioritize North Carolina-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
    North Carolina 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 North Carolina farms, cooperatives, and food producers to
    provide stable revenue and to reduce producer dependence on
    commodity market price volatility.

    (3) The Department shall establish a tobacco-to-food transition
    program, providing technical assistance, guaranteed purchase
    contracts, and infrastructure conversion grants to eastern North
    Carolina farms transitioning from tobacco production to food
    production for the food assurance program. The agricultural
    infrastructure, land, labor knowledge, curing barns, processing
    facilities, built over a century of tobacco production represents
    convertible capacity. This program redirects that capacity from a
    crop that killed its consumers to food that feeds them.

106-856. Tribal partnership provisions.

    (1) The Department shall establish food assurance partnerships
    with the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina and the Eastern Band of
    Cherokee Indians that respect tribal sovereignty and governance
    structures.

    (2) Tribal food assurance partnerships shall be developed in
    consultation with tribal governments and shall not impose State
    operational requirements that conflict with tribal self-
    governance.

    (3) The General Assembly acknowledges that the Lumbee Tribe is
    the largest tribe east of the Mississippi River, with
    approximately 55,000 enrolled members. The Lumbee were
    recognized by North Carolina in 1885 and pursued full federal
    recognition for decades; the Lumbee Act of 1956 named the Lumbee
    as Indian but withheld Bureau of Indian Affairs services. The
    Lumbee Fairness Act, enacted within the 2026 National Defense
    Authorization Act and signed in December 2025, granted the
    Lumbee full federal recognition. The food insecurity and health
    disparities documented in Robeson County preceded that
    recognition by generations. This act addresses them directly.

    (4) The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians maintains the Qualla
    Boundary, a 56,600-acre sovereign territory in five western North
    Carolina counties. Food assurance provisions shall be offered in
    partnership with EBCI governance structures and shall complement,
    not replace, existing tribal programs.

106-857. Reporting.

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

        (a) 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 North Carolina producers;

        (e) Operational costs and surcharge revenue;

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

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

        (h) Tobacco-to-food transition program participation and
        acreage converted.

SECTION 3. Chapter 143B of the General Statutes is amended by adding a new Article 27 to read:

ARTICLE 27 North Carolina Essential Goods Program

143B-500. Short title.

    This Article shall be known and may be cited as the "North
    Carolina Essential Goods Act."

143B-501. Definitions.

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

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

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

        (a) Clothing and footwear;

        (b) Household cleaning and maintenance supplies;

        (c) Personal hygiene products;

        (d) School and educational supplies;

        (e) Basic home furnishings;

        (f) Basic tools and hardware.

    (3) "Department" means the North Carolina Department of Commerce.

143B-502. North Carolina essential goods program, creation, purpose.

    (1) There is hereby created in the Department of Commerce the
    North Carolina essential goods program.

    (2) The purpose of the program is to create procurement contracts
    with North Carolina manufacturers to produce and distribute
    essential goods at below-retail pricing through food assurance
    centers established under G.S. 106-852 and through dedicated
    distribution points established under this Article.

    (3) The program shall:

        (a) Identify essential goods categories suitable for North
        Carolina manufacturing;

        (b) Establish guaranteed purchase contracts with North Carolina
        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 North Carolina's manufacturing sector through
        guaranteed demand contracts;

        (e) Transition essential goods toward distribution through
        the resource library system established under the companion
        North Carolina Public Service and Resource Library Act when
        that program becomes operational.

143B-503. Distribution model, tiered by permanence.

    (1) The distribution of essential goods shall follow the
    resource library model described by Jacque Fresco (2007), in
    which goods are distributed according to need and tiered by
    permanence (the implementation of a statewide resource library
    is addressed in the companion North Carolina Public Service and
    Resource Library Act):

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

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

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

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

143B-504. Reporting.

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

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

        (b) Number and types of essential goods distributed;

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

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

        (e) Progress toward integration with the resource library
        system.

GENERAL PROVISIONS

SECTION 4. Appropriations.

    (1) There is appropriated from the General Fund to the
    Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services the sum of
    $200,000,000 for fiscal year 2026-2027 and $350,000,000 for
    fiscal year 2027-2028 for the establishment and operation of
    the North Carolina food assurance program established under
    Section 2 of this Act;

    (2) There is appropriated from the General Fund to the
    Department of Commerce the sum of $50,000,000 for fiscal year
    2026-2027 for the establishment of the North Carolina essential
    goods program established under Section 3 of this Act;

    (3) The General Assembly shall include ongoing appropriations
    for these programs in each subsequent biennial budget.

SECTION 5. Implementation timeline.

    (1) North Carolina food assurance program: pilot centers
    operational within 24 months of the effective date of this Act.
    Full expansion within 5 years of the effective date.

    (2) North Carolina essential goods program: initial procurement
    contracts and distribution pilot operational within 24 months
    of the effective date. Statewide expansion within 5 years.

    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. At at-cost routing through the food assurance
    program, 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, serving North Carolina's population of
    approximately 11.2 million residents [SOURCE: NC OSBM and U.S.
    Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 estimates, July 1, 2025], requires
    approximately $3.46 billion per year at production cost. That
    figure is $309 per person per year for a base list of 25 staple
    food items priced at 30 percent of cheapest retail, per the
    USDA Food Dollar Series farm-share methodology [SOURCE: USDA
    Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series, 2024 release].
    North Carolina's last fully enacted net General Fund
    appropriations, for fiscal year 2025, were approximately $30.8
    billion [SOURCE: Urban Institute, North Carolina state fiscal
    brief; North Carolina biennial budget enacted October 2023].
    The food program target is therefore approximately 11.2 percent
    of the General Fund. North Carolina operated fiscal year 2026
    under stopgap appropriations during a budget impasse; the
    Senate's proposed 2025-2027 budget set fiscal year 2026 net
    General Fund appropriations at approximately $32.6 billion
    [SOURCE: John Locke Foundation, 2025], against which the same
    target is approximately 10.6 percent. Per-capita General Fund
    spending of roughly $2,750 places North Carolina in the lower
    fiscal tier, and the $309 base-list rate applies.

    FISCAL CONVERGENCE. The arithmetic says ending the gap costs a
    single-digit-to-low-double-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. Augustus formalized the same template
    two thousand years earlier, four hundred years of recorded
    operation; the same Augustus who would have a knight named
    Pinarius stabbed for taking notes still understood that hungry
    citizens are broken infrastructure. North Carolina is not
    asked to attempt something untested. North Carolina is asked
    to deliver to its own residents what its veterans at Fort
    Bragg, Camp Lejeune, Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, Marine
    Corps Air Station Cherry Point, MCAS New River, Pope Army
    Airfield, and Coast Guard Elizabeth City have received since
    1867.

    THE FISCAL LOCK. The argument that North Carolina cannot afford
    this Act is refuted by the State's existing expenditure on the
    less efficient version of the same program while absorbing a
    federal SNAP administrative cost-shift the State did not request
    [SOURCE: H.R. 1, 2025, SNAP administrative cost-share provision].
    Routed through commercial retailers, 75.7 cents of every food
    dollar pays markup, not food [SOURCE: USDA Economic Research
    Service, Food Dollar Series, 2024 release]. Routed at cost
    through this Act, roughly 95 cents reaches the recipient as
    food. The fiscal question is not whether to spend; the State
    already spends. The question is whether to keep spending several
    times as much as required to accomplish the same objective. A
    legislature that has read the arithmetic and declines to act has
    not chosen prudence. It has chosen the more expensive failure.
    Denial is no longer neutral.

SECTION 6. Severability.

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

SECTION 7. Effective date.

    This Act becomes effective July 1, 2027, the beginning of the
    2027-2028 fiscal year.

REFERENCES

The research and citations in this act draw from the following primary sources, the ten-paper Historical Apoplexy series, and North Carolina records.

HISTORICAL APOPLEXY SERIES: - Cooper, I. (2025). Paper I: Concept Definition. - Cooper, I. (2026). Paper II: Historical Arc. - 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 VI: The Resuscitation Document. - Cooper, I. (2026). Paper VII: The Structural Overload. - Cooper, I. (2026). Paper VIII: Venus Prime. - Cooper, I. (2026). Paper X: The Maturity Void.

PRIMARY SOURCES, CLASSICAL AND ECONOMIC: - Smith, A. (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part III, Article II (the "stupid and ignorant" warning) and Article III (the state-funded instruction remedy). Glasgow Edition, Oxford University Press. - Smith, A. (1759). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. - Plato. Republic (c. 375 BC); Meno (c. 385 BC). - Suetonius. The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, Life of Augustus 27 (Loeb Classical Library). - Appian. The Civil Wars, Book 4. Cassius Dio. Roman History (the Nerva alimenta). - Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum XI 1147, the Tabula Alimentaria from Veleia (Parma museum). - Galbraith, J.K. (1958). The Affluent Society. Veblen, T. (1921). The Engineers and the Price System. - Penck, A. (1925). Earth carrying-capacity calculations. Cohen, J. (1995). How Many People Can the Earth Support? - Fresco, J. (2007). Designing the Future.

PRIMARY SOURCES, SCIENCE AND PUBLIC HEALTH: - Marmot, M., et al. The Whitehall Studies (1967-present); The Status Syndrome (2004); The Health Gap (2015). - Sapolsky, R.M. (1994). Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers; (2017). Behave. - Shively, C.A., et al. (2009). Social Stress, Visceral Obesity, and Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis, Obesity 17(8). Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. - Blackburn, E. & Epel, E. (2017). The Telomere Effect; Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2009. - Calhoun, J.B. (1973). Death Squared: The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population. - Luthar, S.S. (2003). The Culture of Affluence, Child Development 74(6); Luthar & Latendresse (2005). Children of the Affluent. - Brinkhuis, H., et al. (2006). Episodic fresh surface waters in the Eocene Arctic Ocean, Nature 441(7093), 606-609 (the Azolla Event). - Yang, X., Gao, Y., Wangdue, S., et al. (2024). Lake-centred sedentary lifestyle of early Tibetan Plateau Indigenous populations, Nature Ecology and Evolution 8 (the Mabu Co site).

STRATIFICATION CORRECTION AND TARGETING ERROR: - Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Capitalist America; (2002). Schooling in Capitalist America Revisited. [Targeting error corrected per Cooper, Paper V, 2025; the BG corner-trap correction appears at Section 1 finding (u1).]

NOTE ON COMPANION BILL REFERENCES: References that previously appeared in this section relating to developmental and education theory (Erikson, Vygotsky, Bjork, van Gennep, Turner, Jackson, Illich, Hirsch, Bloom, Holland, Goleman, Bar-On, Hrabowski / the Meyerhoff Scholars Program) travelled with the Division III extraction to the companion North Carolina Education Modernization Act, which is drafted separately. Calhoun (Universe 25) and Luthar (affluence pathology) are retained above under PRIMARY SOURCES, SCIENCE AND PUBLIC HEALTH because the Universe 25 rebuttal at Section 1 finding (u) draws on them.

STATUTE, CASE LAW, AND FEDERAL DATA: - Leandro v. State, 346 N.C. 336 (1997); Hoke County Bd. of Educ. v. State (2004); North Carolina Supreme Court order dismissing the Leandro litigation, April 2, 2026. - North Carolina Constitution, Article I, Section 15; Article IX, Section 2. - 10 U.S.C. Section 2484 (military commissary no-profit pricing). - H.R. 1 (2025), SNAP administrative cost-share provision. - USDA Economic Research Service, Food Dollar Series, 2024 release; Household Food Security in the United States, 2023. - U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Q4 2024; Federal Reserve G.17 capacity utilization. - OECD and NCES, PIAAC 2023 results, released December 2024. - The 74 Million (October 2025), adult functional-literacy reporting.

NORTH CAROLINA RECORDS: - NC Office of State Budget and Management, Demographic Outlook. - Urban Institute, North Carolina state fiscal brief. - John Locke Foundation (2025), Senate budget analysis. - NC General Assembly Fiscal Research Division. - FRAC (2025), SNAP Fact Sheet: North Carolina. - Feeding America (2025), Map the Meal Gap. - NC Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services; USDA NASS (2024), North Carolina Agricultural Statistics. - NC State Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy reports. - UNC Sheps Center for Health Services Research. - ATSDR, Camp Lejeune water contamination; U.S. Department of Justice Civil Division, Camp Lejeune Justice Act Claims. - Environmental Defense Fund, North Carolina hog industry reports. - NC Military Affairs Commission. - U.S. Census Bureau, North Carolina population estimates, Vintage 2025. - NC A&T State University (2024), enrollment records.

END OF BILL

        North Carolina Food, Resource, and Commodity Assurance Act
        General Assembly of North Carolina, Session 2025

        Drafted incorporating research from:
        Historical Apoplexy (Cooper), Papers I-X, 2025-2026
        Sassafras and Maple Research Foundation (SMRF), est. 2016

        "Fort Bragg's commissary has delivered groceries at cost
         since 1867. This Act extends the same delivery to every
         North Carolinian."

---

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 North Carolina.

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.