The State of Food Production
Floor Speech
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Mr. LaMALFA. Mr. Speaker, we are in perilous times as a Nation due to the weakness we have been projecting in the last 2\1/2\ years from our leadership.
What do we see? When you have a vacuum like that--we know the terminology ``nature abhors a vacuum''--China is all too eager to step in and move in and replace us in that regard. We are seeing that with the undermining of our currency around the world. We see it with the BRICS group trying to go on its own where the American currency for many, many years has been the standard.
Now, we don't have a birthright to that. We don't have a birthright as the United States for being number one in anything, but I think we can agree that we would be stronger as a country, as well as with our good intentions as a people, that the United States is well positioned to continue to be the light of the world that it is capable of being.
With bad leadership, with poor leadership, we allow others to come in and replace us in that role. China is seeking to do so on so many things, like manufacturing and food. That is what I would like to talk about today: food production.
At the same time as western countries are saying we need to blame agriculture for climate change, which basically means CO
They would have us cut one-third of agriculture in this country. John Kerry, the so-called czar, as he flies in his private jet to yet another fancy event in Davos to talk about climate change, along with hundreds of other private jets, would have us cut one-third of our agriculture in this country.
You see that happening in Europe. You see the Dutch farmers valiantly fighting back against their oppressive government where they are wanting to put a bunch of their land out of business. Holland reclaimed a bunch of land from the ocean via those polders, via those levees they used to push back the ocean and made prime farmland out of that. You have extremists trying to push them out. You see Ireland a while back deciding they need to cull about 30 percent, maybe a third of their dairy herd because dairies make CO
There was a time in this country where we had way, way more buffalo on the plains than we do have currently with beef and dairy cattle. That is an interesting stat. It isn't about the animals burping or whatever.
As we see the U.S., due to bad policy, to poor leadership, being displaced in that area, do we really want to become dependent even more so on China and a cartel they might be in with Russia and other alliances they have with Iran, to be more and more dependent on them? We are already dependent on them for 90 percent of our pharmaceuticals, and so much of our manufactured products. Do you want to do that to agriculture, too? It makes no sense.
You see what is happening in my home State of California, where California produces so many of these great crops here. Ninety-plus percent that Americans rely on comes from California. We saw just last year, in 2022, that due to the decisions made by the Bureau of Reclamation and others, and the environmental groups, the water got cut off from Shasta Dam and other Federal project water to much of agriculture.
We saw just an example of rice, for example. Normally, about half a million acres of rice are grown in California. They cut that number in half to 250,000. Do you know how devastating that is to communities when you have that and other crops just wiped away because of mismanagement of our water supply during a drought period?
There is still plenty of water that hits California, plenty of snowpack. We were certainly blessed with a lot this year that made things good for the 2023 crops. We are still having a decent carryover, it looks like. As we watch, they are going to fritter the water away at this time of year, as they have to lower the lakes to have a flood control level, conservation level. Indeed, the water that could be used for other things is just now going out to the ocean as so much of it is. It is a water-management issue. It is a leadership issue.
Where is this food going to come from? They want to continue to take dams out. I heard a colleague here yesterday say, well, these dams haven't been maintained over the years. Well, that is purposeful. If the government doesn't put forward the dollars and the effort and the permitting process to maintain and keep dams upgraded, yeah, after 40 years they can deteriorate. Then someone decides, well, it is going to be too expensive to revamp the dam, to bring it up to spec, so let's go ahead and tear it out. That is what they want to begin with.
Where is our food going to come from if we don't have the dams, the water storage, our hydroelectric power, all of those things? It makes no sense what we are doing.
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