The food industry slammed Vice President Kamala Harris for blaming high inflation under the Biden-Harris administration on corporate greed and proposing price controls on food and groceries.
"We understand why there is this sticker shock and why it’s upsetting," said Andrew Harig, a vice president at FMI, a trade association representing food retailers and suppliers. "But to automatically just say there’s got to be something nefarious, I think to us that is oversimplified."
Food industry executives said companies have seen their expenses soar due to rising worker wages and supply chain costs under the Biden-Harris administration, the Wall Street Journal reported. Harris’s claims of consumer exploitation, they said, are misleading as profit margins for food makers and sellers remain modest compared with other industries.
"The proposal calling for a ban on grocery price gouging is a solution in search of a problem," the National Grocers Association told the Journal, noting that its members are hurting from the same inflation as customers.
Harris, who will officially accept her party’s nomination this week at the Democratic National Convention, has come under scrutiny since she on Friday called for a series of radical economic policies, including an unprecedented federal ban on food and grocery price gouging that economists have likened to communist regimes.
"They tried [price controls] in Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, the USSR. No, that’s not going to work," Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary said on Saturday.
Bob Unanue, CEO of the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the United States, said Harris’s economic proposals would put the "last nails in the coffin of this economy and this country" and that the Biden-Harris administration "started a war" against the American middle class from day one.
"People are voting with their stomachs," Republican nominee Donald Trump said of grocery prices, which Labor Department data show were still nearly 30 percent higher in July than in 2019. Harris’s price controls on food would lead to "rationing, hunger, and skyrocketing prices," the former president added.
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