LA Alliance Reports Inequities in Grocery Industry
The LA-based Alliance for Healthy and Responsible Grocery Stores, a city-wide coalition of 25 community, faith-based, labor, and environmental organizations, just released an exhaustive report entitled ” Feeding Our Communities: A Call for Standards for Food Access and Job Quality in Los Angeles’ Grocery Industry”. The report is based on several months of public hearings in which residents, industry experts, academics, workers and clergy gave their testimony regarding the practices of L.A.’s grocery industry.
The report describes a growing divide between the grocery industry’s treatment of L.A.’s high and low-income communities and charges that supermarket chains in the Los Angeles area are guilty of ignoring and mistreating the area’s low-income communities. The Alliance for Healthy and Responsible Grocery Stores is expected to call for citywide legislation that would create uniform standards for grocery operations in Los Angeles, ensuring that inner city neighborhoods receive equitable and fair treatment.
While not the first such report or study of it’s kind, “Feeding Our Communities” is an important report because it was produced by a coalition of community organizations and is based on the testimony of real people who experience the inequitable and unfair practices of the food retail industry first-hand. I’m hopeful that this report will not only result in important policy changes and improved practices of grocery operations in LA, but that the revelations of the report will create a ripple affect in other cities, such as Oakland, that are equally affected by this issue.
