[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 4]
[House]
[Page 5039]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1230
                               WATER WEEK

  (Mr. COSTA asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. COSTA. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to speak about our most precious 
natural resource: water.
  It is Water Week here in D.C.; but in the San Joaquin Valley, in 
California, it is always Water Week.
  At first glance at this picture, you might think this was taken in an 
underdeveloped country thousands of miles away. It is not. These are 
the squalid living conditions in California's San Joaquin Valley. They 
are a direct result of the extreme lack of water in California.
  While, in part, the drought is to blame, our inability to move the 
limited water is exacerbating the crisis. While conditions like these 
are unacceptable, I think to all of us in the richest country in the 
world, we must do something about it.
  It takes water to grow food, period. California grows half the 
Nation's fruits and vegetables and more, but this year, some estimates 
say that 1 million acres out of 6 million acres usually in production 
will be fallowed.
  In the short term, we need to act on operational flexibility to deal 
with this crisis. In the long term, it is time that we fix this broken 
water system not just for California, but for the West and for the 
entire world to whom we provide a large part of the food supply. This 
is the challenge of the 21st century.

                          ____________________