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PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Karen Karp, President of Karen Karp & Partners, on Food Infrastructure and Affordability
1:57:53
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173 sec
Karen Karp, President of Karen Karp & Partners, testified on the importance of maintaining public food infrastructure like the Hunts Point produce market to ensure food affordability and competition in New York City. She highlighted the issues with concentrated and vertically integrated food systems and emphasized the need for highly educated and trained individuals in the food sector.
- Karp stressed the role of Hunts Point market in maintaining an open environment for competition among food buyers and sellers.
- She supported the renovation of Hunts Point produce market with additional elements for education, training, innovation, and energy resilience.
- Karp echoed the need for creating better-paying food jobs to improve affordability for workers in the food industry.
Karen Karp
1:57:53
Thanks, everybody.
1:57:54
And, actually, I'm I'm very glad that I'm going I'm very glad that I'm going after Rachel today because my testimony actually supports supports one of her major points.
1:58:05
I have really two major points to make.
1:58:08
One is I wanted to bring up a specific element about, food affordability and about the role of city food infrastructure to maintain food affordability.
1:58:19
One of the reasons that food has become so expensive both to for consumers, but if we talk about, buyers that that buy in a commercial environment, is because the food system has become so concentrated over the last fifty years.
1:58:34
And now, most buyers specifically who are serving city agencies and other corporations and restaurants, hotels, etcetera, are are are unfortunately too frequently bypassing public infrastructure like the Hunts Point market because they are part of a vertically integrated supply chain where companies are contracting with farmers for direct shipment to their warehouses, which too frequently do not exist in in New York City or even in the New York City Metropolitan area, but in New Jersey, Connecticut, etcetera.
1:59:08
And then those same companies are creating contracts with buyers, including institutional buyers, including institutional food buyers in New York City and elsewhere with fixed prices.
1:59:20
And so there is very little room.
1:59:23
There is no room actually for negotiation of those prices because the the the food system is in is concentrated and vertically integrated end to end.
1:59:33
The fact function of the Hunts Point produce market in particular is a, keeps an open environment of competition available for food buyers.
1:59:46
And there's hundreds of there's hundreds of buyers there every day.
1:59:49
There's dozens of vendors there every day selling food and competing against each other for that food, keeping competition alive.
Rafael Salamanca, Jr.
1:59:57
The time has expired.
1:59:58
Thank you.
Karen Karp
1:59:59
Okay.
2:00:01
Thank you.
Gale A. Brewer
2:00:03
If you wanna sum up, go ahead.
2:00:04
If you wanna sum up.
2:00:08
You've to cut off.
2:00:09
Go ahead.
Karen Karp
2:00:10
Yeah.
2:00:11
My second point echoing Rachel's, which is the summary, is that the the food system needs more highly educated, highly trained individuals which will create good food jobs, which will alleviate at least for the 9% of people that work in food in New York City to have better incomes which will improve affordability for them.
2:00:32
So in summary, I am fully in support of the renovation of the Hunts Point produce market with programmatic elements built in for education, training, innovation, incubation, energy resilience, etcetera.
2:00:46
Thank you.