[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 69 (Wednesday, April 27, 2022)]
[House]
[Pages H4514-H4515]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  INFLATION--FOOD AND WATER SHORTAGES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. LaMalfa) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LaMALFA. Madam Speaker, we are dealing with an awful lot of grave 
issues. Indeed, they become crises when they aren't managed correctly 
in this country.
  So we are hearing a lot about inflation and feeling the effects, 
especially regular people, middle-income people, lower-middle-income 
people, low-income people are being harmed by the policies put forth 
the last year and a quarter.
  We hear a lot about how Americans are paying more:
  Vehicles. You can't hardly find a new vehicle, and the price of used 
vehicles has skyrocketed.
  Gas at the pump. Do I need to talk about that anymore?
  Lodging.
  Airline fares to even get us to our jobs here in Washington, D.C., 
but for regular people on vacation and doing their business as well.
  What isn't being talked about enough? The cost of food and the 
availability of food.
  Inflation is hitting it hard, too.
  Cost of inputs.
  In my home State, lack of water. Lack of water in California.
  Why does that matter to the rest of the country? Well, I will tell 
you. Farms and ranches produce about $50 billion in output in 
California, but there needs to be water for the crops.
  Environmental laws are forcing the release of water down the rivers 
and out to the oceans for coho salmon, delta smelt, et cetera.
  Our agriculture sector in California is the most important in the 
United States. There are a lot of other very important sectors as well.
  We lead the Nation in over 77 different crops, including many fruit 
and vegetable specialty crops. Our top commodities are milk, almonds, 
grapes, cattle and calves, strawberries, pistachios, lettuce, walnuts, 
floriculture, tomatoes, rice, broilers, carrots, hay, broccoli, 
tangerines, oranges, and lemons, to name a few.
  Our State is the only producer--which means 99 percent or more--of 
almonds, artichokes, celery, figs, garlic, honeydew, nectarines, 
olives, peaches, sweet rice, and walnuts.
  For almonds, California grows all the domestic production, and 77 
percent of global production comes from California.
  So it is kind of important that the water flows through our State. 
That is one of the important inputs that we are short on.
  I talked about the energy costs. On my own farm, we are fortunate 
enough to have a fairly decent water allocation where I live in my part 
of the State, but I have neighbors to the west and south of me 
receiving, in some cases, zero percent allocations. Zero.
  Take rice production, for example. It is going to be down probably by 
about half. As a rice grower that gravely concerns me, but as a food 
producer, and all of you as food consumers, you need to be greatly 
concerned. These policies can be avoided. We still have a point that we 
can save this springtime and get crops planted with water that is 
available presently.
  Instead, we are watching world events here. Ukraine, their farmers 
are dodging bombs right now trying to get crops planted. Russia has 
actually been somewhat of an important exporter, not so much to this 
country but we import some things from them: fertilizer, some of our 
energy.
  We need to be putting a stop to that and become self-sufficient like 
we can. We should have energy independence. We had that up until a year 
ago.

  So we are going to keep shorting ourselves on crops growing because 
of environmental laws, taking the water away, shifting it to a fish 
that doesn't even exist in the delta anymore in northern California, 
the smelt. Trillions of gallons of water going out into the ocean and 
fields being idled; permanent crops being destroyed; trees and vines 
just dying because there is no water for them.
  We are going to feel that. We are already feeling it in the stores. 
When you can go to a major supermarket and see a whole freezer section 
has nothing in it, in the United States of America, that blows my mind. 
We can grow plenty here, and we always have until these times. 
Environmental laws are trumping what people need. Bad energy policy is 
driving the cost of everything.
  Some of the fertilizer I have to put on my crops has over doubled in 
price. That all has to be made up somewhere. Either the farmer eats it 
and goes out of business, or it has to be made up on a store shelf. 
Somewhere along the chain it has to be made up for.
  We can produce the energy that produces fertilizer that fuels the 
tractors, the trucks, the combines, everything it takes to bring a crop 
in, we can produce it here. We are capable of it. Yet, we are being 
paralyzed by policies at the Federal level and at my home State level 
as well.
  One of the ideas in the legislature on top of everything, on top of 
this $6 gas we have in California, is to add more gas tax on top of 
that by our State legislature.
  That is not your problem, the rest of the country. I mean, sometimes 
we are a comic show at what we do out there, and we get laughed at by 
the rest of the country, but we won't fix it here. It needs to be fixed 
there.
  Don't do what we do, okay, rest of the country?
  We need to set policy here where we can in Congress at the Federal 
level that brings us energy independence and helps put food back on the 
table instead of taking the water away and raising the costs of 
everything so much that we can't farm this country anymore.

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