Energy Independence and Food Security
Floor Speech
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Mr. LaMALFA. Madam Speaker, many Americans are wondering: Why are food prices so high? What causes this? Why, even on occasions in the land of plenty, do we see food shortages of certain types on our shelves?
It really boils down to several factors. Energy independence is one of them. Food security and energy independence go hand-in-hand.
It is certainly time for President Biden and his administration to take action to renew our economic vitality. Instead of supporting our farmers and ensuring a stable food supply, it appears agriculture and the industry itself have been turned into a partisan issue, leaving farmers to fend for themselves in a really hostile regulatory environment.
As we navigate these challenges facing our ag sector, it is crucial to recognize the far-reaching implications of the Biden administration's anti-American energy policy. The push to have everything convert to electric vehicles, whether it is our cars, pickups, tractors, trucks, let alone our appliances at home, is going to be, indeed, very costly and probably not even possible with the energy grid we currently have, especially with anti-energy policies.
They really play heck trying to get a new power plant sited, even a nuclear power plant. In my district right now, they are tearing down hydroelectric dams, which is clean, reliable, CO
If that is not enough, what we are looking at is, on the other side of the scale for farmers trying to provide food, water is not allocated, especially in my home State, that is due them for their water rights. We had almost record rain and snowpack last year, and it is pretty good this year. Yet, there are areas in the San Joaquin Valley that are only going to receive 15 percent of their normal allocated water rights.
Mr. Speaker, I remind my colleagues that my home State of California grows all of these crops here, somewhere between 100 percent or a little less, that the U.S. relies on. Otherwise, these would be imported crops. So many of them come from my home State of California, yet we can't get the water supply, even though we could store it. We are watching so much of it be washed out to the ocean through the delta for no good reason.
The Army Corps of Engineers uses 50-year-old manuals to decide how much water they should keep in their reservoirs up to that point where they stop their conservation mode for flood control. I get it. Flood control is needed, but we have 500,000 acre-feet of space still left in Lake Oroville, 600,000 acre-feet of space left in Shasta Lake, and it is not coming up fast enough to meet an April 1 mark, let alone get full by May or June.
What does that mean? Several hundred thousand acre-feet of water probably left on the table that aren't going to grow these crops right here--and people are wondering why their food is expensive.
Energy policy is driving up the cost of diesel. It doubled fuel for me and my farm and everybody else a couple of years ago, and it tripled the cost of fertilizer for farmers across the country, all because of bad energy policy.
When my colleagues on the other side of the aisle shut down pipelines, shut down exploration, shut down the ability to make our own energy in this country and have to rely on importing it from, a lot of times, adversarial countries, what do citizens expect is going to happen to the cost of anything since everything is so energy dependent and energy based in our economy?
Indeed, if we are going to grow this food in California or in our own country, we are going to have a much more secure situation with our food supply and stability across the board. As we know, food security is national security, so Americans feel the cost of high energy, high food costs, high just about everything, and a lot of this has happened in the last 3 years. We had a lot more stability under the previous administration.
COVID was weaponized to try to shut down a lot of our country, a lot of our economy, and make people stay at home. Indeed, that had an effect we are still feeling. Even our kids in school are feeling that still because of an overbearing COVID policy that has also added trillions to our national debt.
What are we going to do? Are we going to have an energy policy that makes sense, or do we want to rely on China for imported food and other products and the Middle East for imported oil?
I personally think we are going to get a heck of a lot better product growing these crops in California or elsewhere in the United States than by relying upon others to send it to us because, when the chips are down, America is always there for other people, but they aren't necessarily going to be there for us if we have our own crisis.
We are the last bastion. We are the last beacon many times in the world. We have to hold our leaders accountable for an energy policy and putting our food policy up front as well. We need to pass a farm bill soon.
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