[Congressional Record Volume 170, Number 50 (Thursday, March 21, 2024)]
[House]
[Page H1302]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1030
                 ENERGY INDEPENDENCE AND FOOD SECURITY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
California (Mr. LaMalfa) for 5 minutes.
  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, CO2-free 
power.
  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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