An interactive map of neighborhoods lacking easy access to fresh food was released late last month. Ohio — as well as every other state — is flecked with black census tracts that meet the group’s definition of food deserts.

It didn’t have to be this way, said the group that produced the map, the Institute for Local Self Reliance. If the federal government hadn’t stopped enforcing a Depression-era antitrust law in the early 1980s, independent grocery stores would still be thriving in small towns and in poor urban neighborhoods, it said.

“Since the early 1980s, independents’ market share has fallen from over 50 percent to about 25 percent,” the group said in a report accompanying the map.

It defined an urban food desert as a low-income census tract with at least 500 people or 33% of the population living a mile or more from the nearest supermarket, large grocery or supercenter. For rural tracts, the parameters were the same, except people had to be 10 or more miles away from the nearest groceries. Convenience and dollar stores didn’t count as grocery stores.

In Ohio, predictably, the largest geographical deserts are in rural areas, many concentrated in the southeastern portion of the state. But if you zoom in on the big cities, deserts aren’t hard to find.

In Columbus, for example, eight contiguous tracts east and just north of downtown are deserts. They include the Milo-Grogan and Linden communities.

Such neighborhoods were never wealthy, but they haven’t always lacked easy grocery access. But then the government stopped enforcing a law that prohibited big players from forcing suppliers to give them special deals.

“… poverty and small towns are not new,” the report said. “Food deserts are. They arrived relatively recently, beginning in the late 1980s, as the suspension of (Robinson-Patman Act) enforcement undermined competition and drove consolidation in the grocery sector.”

The 1936 Robinson-Patman Act requires suppliers to offer the same deals to all buyers regardless of their size. Discounts can be offered for big purchases over smaller ones, but only to the extent of the seller’s savings.

At the start of the 1980s, the federal government stopped enforcing that and other antitrust laws on the rationale that corporate consolidation would actually be good for consumers. Much of the thinking originated with economists and lawyers at the University of Chicago.

Four decades later, a group of thinkers at the university’s Booth School of Business said their predecessors’ arguments didn’t win because consumers were clamoring for what they called “efficiency.” Instead, “a key factor was lobbying by wealthy and powerful business interests,” a 2023 article in the Chicago Booth Review said.

The results of non-enforcement of Robinson-Patman might have been good for those interests. But they’ve been disastrous for American communities and consumers, the report by the Institute for Local Self Reliance said.

Large grocers were able to force suppliers to offer them better deals, which allowed them to undercut independents and small chains on price. That eventually forced the little guys from the field, the report said.

After 1980, independents’ market share was cut in half. And that made the creation of food deserts a viable business model for the bigs, the report said.

“As independent grocers disappeared … competitive pressure vanished,” the report said. “Large chains no longer faced locally owned rivals in many rural towns and urban neighborhoods, which meant they no longer needed to maintain local stores to capture local spending.

“Instead, they could rely on residents to travel to another town or neighborhood to shop at their other locations. Meanwhile, those without the means to travel were left to get by on the meager selection of processed foods available at dollar stores and gas stations.”

To keep up with consolidation by grocery retailers, suppliers were consolidated into companies such as Tyson Foods, Unilever, and PepsiCo. That created a further upward pressure on grocery prices, the Institute for Local Self Reliance report said.

For example, days before Donald Trump took office last year, the Federal Trade Commission sued PepsiCo.

It accused the company of an arrangement that allowed Walmart to sell its products more cheaply than the giant’s competitors. Pepsi learned that a grocer said to be Food Lion — which tended to operate in low and middle-income neighborhoods — was selling products more cheaply than Pepsi wanted. So Pepsi punished Food Lion with a multi-year plan forcing the grocer to raise prices on Pepsi products more quickly than its competitors, the lawsuit said.

When he took office Trump controversially tried to remove the Democratic appointees from the Trade Commission. The three Republican commissioners then voted to dismiss the suit against Pepsi.

The allegations in the suit show that grocery giants have an incentive to inflate prices that goes beyond short-term profits, the Institute for Local Self Reliance report said. In the absence of antitrust enforcement, the bigs can use higher prices to drive competitors out of business, allowing them to push prices higher still.

“These cost increases actually benefit the largest grocery chains, which continue to pull further ahead,” the report said. “That’s because suppliers raise prices unevenly — charging smaller retailers more while shielding Walmart and Kroger from the full increases. This allows the largest chains to continue to undercut competitors. As a result, consolidation at both the retail and supplier levels reinforces itself, driving prices higher.”

The original story can be found at ohiocapitaljournal.com.