A Federal Effort to Push Junk Food Out of Schools - NYT

A Federal Effort to Push Junk Food Out of Schools - NYT

A Federal Effort to Push Junk Food Out of Schools
By GARDINER HARRIS

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will begin a drive this week to expel Pepsi, French fries and Snickers bars from the nation’s schools in hopes of reducing the number of children who get fat during their school years.

In legislation, soon to be introduced, candy and sugary beverages would be banned and many schools would be required to offer more nutritious fare.

To that end, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will deliver a speech Monday at the National Press Club in which he will insist, according to excerpts provided to The Times, that any vending machines that remain in schools be “filled with nutritious offerings to make the healthy choice the easy choice for our nation’s children.”

The first lady, Michelle Obama, said last month that she would lead an initiative to reduce childhood obesity, and her involvement “shows the importance all of us place on this issue,” Mr. Vilsack said.

The administration’s willingness to put Mrs. Obama’s popularity on the line is a calculated bet that concerns about childhood obesity have become so universal that the once-partisan fight over who should control school food offerings — the federal government or school boards — has subsided.

But Republican support is far from certain.

Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican and the ranking member on the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry, met at the White House with Mrs. Obama on Tuesday to talk about childhood obesity. And while Mr. Chambliss released a statement saying that “schools play an important role in shaping nutrition habits of young children,” an aide refused to say whether he would support a ban on junk foods.

Other Republicans said they would wait to see legislation before signaling whether they would put aside long-held views that school boards should control food offerings.

Senator Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat from Arkansas and the chairwoman of the committee, said she would introduce the legislation within weeks. “It’s a big priority for me, other members and the administration,” she said.

While Democrats have coalesced around the idea of denying sweets to schoolchildren, many students are not keen. When Asthtyn Bowling, a 16-year-old junior at Orange County High School in Orange, Va., was told of the looming ban, she was shocked.

“That would be terrible!” she said.

The legislation would reauthorize the government’s school breakfast and lunch programs. It aims to transform the eating habits of many of the nation’s children and teenagers, but some school officials say it will further crimp already strained budgets.

In addition to banning sugary treats, the new rules would require many schools to offer more nutritious options, which could be expensive. The administration has proposed spending $1 billion more each year on the $18 billion meals program, but the increase may not be enough to cover the extra costs.

The National PTA and a host of health and medical advocacy groups support the legislation, but local school officials are lukewarm.

“Our feeling is that school boards are acutely aware of the importance of ensuring that children have access to healthy and nutritious food,” said Lucy Gettman of the National School Boards Association.

The bill would exempt bake sales, parties and other occasional offerings of sweets. But drawing the line between routine and unusual can get tricky.

“What do you do about the Spanish club buying Kit Kat bars and selling them in the cafeteria?” asked Doug Davis, director of food service for the City of Burlington Public Schools in Vermont.

The National School Lunch Program serves 31 million children in more than 100,000 schools. It was started in 1946 to ensure that children get enough to eat after health problems related to malnutrition were found in an alarming number of World War II draftees. Now, health officials are also worried that children are eating too much of the wrong foods. About two-thirds of the nation’s adults and a third of its children are overweight — double the rates of 1980.

Junk food has long been banned from official school breakfast and lunch programs, but many schools offer fatty foods and sweets outside of these programs or have vending machines with sodas and candy, with the money often used to finance sports or other extracurricular programs. The legislation would require that all school offerings comply with strict new nutritional guidelines.

Many schools have changed their offerings. Five years ago, fewer than a third of the nation’s school districts put limits on students’ access to candy and sugary drinks. That share jumped to two-thirds by 2008, according to a survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. William H. Dietz, an obesity researcher at the disease centers, said that changing school food policies had already helped.

“There’s been a plateau in childhood obesity, and I think one of the reasons is that things are different in schools,” he said.

Industry opposition to the new legislation has softened in part because the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo now sell far more than Coke and Pepsi. So instead of having to yank vending machines from schools, the companies could replace offerings with bottled water or juice.

Kevin Keane, senior vice president of the American Beverage Association, said that companies had been voluntarily taking high-calorie drinks out of schools. But, he said, the industry does not favor a federal ban.

Orange County High School has vending machines with Pepsi, Mountain Dew and Dr Pepper, but even more popular among students is a candy cart wheeled into the school’s central hallway three times a day by Betty Almond, a school secretary.

The cart is laden with Pop-Tarts, Skittles and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Mrs. Almond and helpers barely keep up with demand from students on their way to class. Sales are between $400 and $500 a week, which Mrs. Almond uses to buy uniforms and equipment for school sports teams. Her most recent project was to outfit the wrestling team, on which her grandson competes.

“The football team wants me to buy them a seven-man sled, but with this new legislation, they’ll never get it,” she said sadly.

Principal Gene Kotulka said he planned to write his congressman to complain about a ban.

“It’s not so much the money as the service it offers to the kids,” said Mr. Kotulka, who has a Santa Claus belly and is known as “Poppa K” to students. “I’d like to give our kids all the opportunities I can.”

At a meeting in his office to discuss food offerings, Bette Winter, director of the Orange County schools wellness committee, suggested that selling candy to students was not a good lesson.

“What’s the best way to teach children? By example, no?” she asked.

But Mr. Kotulka responded that it was parents’ responsibility to forbid children at risk of obesity to buy candy.

Whether the new rules will change eating habits is unknown, but Mrs. Almond’s candy cart became popular only after the school cafeteria got rid of its own sweets two years ago.

Edgar Coker, an 18-year-old senior, buys Pop-Tarts from Mrs. Almond every afternoon for 50 cents. “If I couldn’t buy it here, I’d bring it from home,” he said.

But Denise Snow, the school cafeteria manager, said that children can be taught to eat better. “When we went to whole-wheat pizza, the kids fussed for a while and we lost some of them,” Ms. Snow said. “But now they don’t say a thing, and pretty much everyone is back to eating them.”

Pay up - NYT

Pay up - NYT

Published: February 7, 2010

Claimants are still looking for their money, more than a decade after the federal Department of Agriculture reached a landmark settlement for having cheated generations of black farmers through “indifference and blatant discrimination.” The 1999 agreement on what is known as the Pigford class-action lawsuit was hailed as the biggest civil rights settlement in American history. The judge estimated a swift $2 billion payout — or $60,000 each — for victimized black farmers.

It has not worked out that way, as the White House’s new budget confirms with a request for $1.15 billion to pay still-pending claims from black farmers. The same amount was requested last year but did not survive the self-interested knives and elbows of the Congressional budget scrum.

The class-action suit detailed how eligible black farmers traditionally were denied loans by the agriculture agency while their white peers went to the head of the line for growing-season wherewithal and homestead improvements.

After the settlement, some farmers got their money, but far too many ran into a new buzz saw. They were stalled and rejected through paperwork technicalities, tight deadlines and a lengthy appeals process that officials insisted was necessary. There was early confusion within the Obama administration about whether the settlement process had been capped, but Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack insists no; the aim, he says, is to finally “close this unfortunate chapter.”

Pigford v. Glickman has not resonated across the land like Brown v. Board of Education, but the very same history of crippling injustice is at its heart. The Pigford settlement will remain a misnomer until the nation rights this historic injustice and pays what it owes.

Wal-Mart, Target seek big returns in small stores - Reuters

Wal-Mart, Target seek big returns in small stores - Reuters

Retailers like Target Corp (TGT.N) and Wal-Mart Stores Inc (WMT.N) have expanded since the late 1980s by opening stores as large as three U.S. football fields.

In the last few years, they began to plan for smaller stores that fit in urban markets. That strategy is gaining urgency now as retailers look for new growth and seek to meet the demands of a shopper looking to buy and spend less.

Target and Wal-Mart have both told analysts they are creating smaller stores that could fit in the heart of densely packed cities where they have no presence. But analysts warn that creating a small store doesn't just mean shrinking a big one.

Big box retailers need to whittle their merchandise to suit shoppers who live in smaller spaces, use public transportation and prefer eating at coffee tables to large dining sets.

They also need to figure out how to make money if they cannot stock as many high-profit margin goods, like clothes, to offset brisk sales of low-margin items, like pasta sauce.

"When you have a big box mentality, your orientation is toward lots of SKUs (items
across lots of categories," said Leon Nicholas, director of retail insight at Kantar Retail.

"When you try to move into a small box the question then becomes do you cut SKUs or do you cut categories so far ... that you loose that one-stop-shop kind of mission?"

Or, he said: "Can you be Wal-Mart in a small box?"

SHIFTING SHOPPERS, SHIFTING STORE STRATEGY

Wal-Mart and Target's massive stores can combine a grocery store and a discount store under one roof.

Building huge stores made sense when suburban landscapes were wide open and baby boomers were moving away from cities. Easy access to credit fueled customer demand for larger homes and all the trappings that went with them.

But trends are now colliding to make big stores less attractive. Baby boomers are scaling back, moving into smaller homes closer to urban areas. The housing market crash means new neighborhoods are not springing up to support retail centers.

Meanwhile access to credit has dried up stalling consumer spending. And the worst U.S. recession since the Great Depression has left consumers with a frugal mindset.

"There's a general movement in America to close stores, to reduce the size of stores, to slow down expansion because of what has happened over the last 20, 25 years," said Allen Questrom, a Wal-Mart director.

"That's a challenge that we're going to be seeing over the next 10 years -- the reconfiguration of stores."

Big box retailers are already found in many cities. Home Depot Inc (HD.N) and Costco Wholesale (COST.O) operate in Manhattan, and Target is set to open a store there this year.

But many of these stores, sometimes built on the outskirts of a city, look similar to their suburban cousins. Target's Manhattan store will be 174,000 square feet -- bigger than its average general merchandise store size of 128,000 square feet.

With the latest urban focus, retailers are expected to invent formats that differ dramatically from current ones.

Gilford Securities analyst Bernard Sosnick expects Wal-Mart to test a 10,000 square foot store featuring financial services, like check cashing. The stores could also offer Wal-Mart's entire merchandise through site-to-store, where shoppers buy online and have an item sent to a store.

"There's a place for a store at every bus stop, at every subway station," he said of the small store potential.

Wal-Mart is emphasizing the success it is having running smaller stores internationally, especially in Mexico.

"There's a trend around the world toward small stores ... and we're already operating them and operating them profitably," Wal-Mart International CEO Doug McMillon told analysts in October.

Analysts expect Target's smaller stores to be 60,000 to 100,000 square feet. Target is already testing a new "assortment approach" in three stores, where it is offering 50 percent fewer items to see how customers react.

"We believe the smaller prototype will be a critical strategy to help mitigate the lack of new commercial real estate projects currently underway," wrote Piper Jaffray analyst Jeffrey Klinefelter in a note.

SUCCESS NO SURE BET

Success on a small scale does not come easy.

Wal-Mart opened convenience-sized grocery stores called Marketside in 2008. But the concept is on hold, and its website touts Marketside branded food and not the four-store chain.

Wal-Mart also faces opposition, especially from unions, to entering many cities. Questrom expects that will dissipate in the next decade as consumers, accustomed to finding these stores in the suburbs, expect to see them in cities.

The two retailers will need to follow different approaches in seeking small store success, analysts said. Wal-Mart might focus on necessities, like financial services or food, that shoppers buy frequently, while Target will need to recreate the "treasure hunt" shoppers have come to expect in its stores.

"Wal-Mart is much better at replenishment" shopping, said Nicholas. "Target is .. better at, 'Hey look what I found today, I found this new designer.' It's more of a discretionary trip."

Either way, analysts said small stores will be crucial.

"The trend toward small box retailing makes all the sense in the world," Nicholas said. "It lines up with demographic trends, it lines up with how people want to shop."

Supermarkets agree to phase out leases

Supermarkets agree to phase out leases
February 8, 2010 - 4:59PM


More supermarket retailers have promised the competition watchdog to end a practice that prevents rivals from opening in the same shopping centre.

Aldi Foods Pty Ltd, Franklins Pty Ltd, SPAR Australia Ltd, Australian United Retailers Ltd and Metcash Ltd have agreed with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) that they will not enter into any new leasing agreements with restrictive provisions.

In the case of existing leases, the supermarket groups will not enforce any restrictive provisions beyond five years after the commencement of trading.

"These further agreements with the next tier of supermarket operators mean that many more shopping centres will no longer be hamstrung by restrictive provisions in leases that prevent or hinder the entry of competing supermarkets," ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel said in a statement on Monday.

The pact between the ACCC and the five groups follows similar agreements with Wesfarmers Ltd owned Coles and Woolworths Ltd in September last year.

The two retail giants promised the ACCC they would no longer insert restrictive provisions into their supermarket leases, and 80 per cent of shopping centre deals favouring the two companies were abolished.

FW Holst retail analyst David Spry said consumers would benefit from the agreements and there would be no major effect on any retailer's profitability.

"I don't think it would have a major impact on profitability as I see it," Mr Spry said.

"I suppose the only time it may, if it came close to one of the better performing stores and took a little bit of the cream off that in each individual store.

"Overall, on a group basis, it probably won't be material," Mr Spry said.

"It's a win for the consumers, there's no question about that."

The agreements reached with Coles and Woolworths are in the form of court-enforceable undertakings that have been voluntarily provided.