Bioeconomy Research and Development Act of 2021

Floor Speech

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Madam Speaker, I rise to offer amendment 22 as a designee of Congressman Jamaal Bowman.

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I first want to offer my congratulations to the chairwoman of the committee for this very, very important piece of legislation.

Madam Speaker, I rise today as the designee of Congressman Jamaal Bowman to offer this amendment. The climate crisis is the single biggest threat facing humanity, and if we are going to address it at the scale needed to limit global warming to not more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, we are going to have to work together. We are going to need unprecedented levels of global cooperation and collaboration to meet everyone's basic needs, including food, clean water, and keeping the communities we call home habitable.

At the same time, we increasingly rely upon sanctions as a key foreign policy lever. The material impact of sanctions is known to undermine the human rights of civilians who can get cut off from access to basic needs, often the same basic needs that are threatened by the very climate crisis, as we see increasingly more frequent extreme weather events.

This amendment would simply require the State Department to issue a report in coordination with the Department of Energy on the impact that sanctions have on our ability to be innovative in addressing the climate crisis and economic justice. This will give us important information as we seek to create and craft sanctions or understand the impact of sanctions and decide not to use them.

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Madam Speaker, I am prepared to close, and I yield myself the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I don't really understand--and with tremendous respect to my colleague across the aisle--how assigning a report so that we can get more information about the effect of sanctions on the people of a country undermines in any way anything that we are trying to do in this bill. In fact, competitiveness is deeply tied to whether or not we adhere to human rights values that the United States holds very dear. And the question of how we can be most effective in our policy is very important to this bill.

So I really don't understand why we wouldn't want the information that a report is going to generate unless we are afraid that it is going to present some choice that feels very difficult to us. So I am not sure why there would be resistance to a report that says, Department of Energy, in coordination with the State Department, tell us what impact sanctions have on our ability to be innovative, one of the key goals of this bill, in addressing the climate crisis and economic justice.

Let's not disentangle competitiveness from justice. Let's not disentangle competitiveness from our ability to uphold our core values as a country.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Madam Speaker, I rise today to offer an amendment to the America COMPETES Act section 60501.

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Madam Speaker, I rise today to encourage my colleagues to vote for my amendment to section 60501 of the America COMPETES Act, which asks the Treasury Department to study the growth of Chinese Government influence and illicit finance in Afghanistan.

My amendment would also require the Treasury to examine the humanitarian impact of U.S. sanctions in Afghanistan, projected increases in civilian deaths and refugees, and the resulting effect on additional Chinese Government influence in Afghanistan.

Today's New York Times published a harrowing front-page article headlined ``Over a Million Flee as Afghanistan's Economy Collapses,'' which reports that for millions already living hand to mouth, Western sanctions have led to life-threatening hunger across the country as incomes have dried up and humanitarian aid has been obstructed.

After our withdrawal from Afghanistan, U.S. sanctions on the Taliban have impacted the broader functioning of the entire Afghan Government, including schools and hospitals, which cannot buy food for patients or gas to heat their buildings.

The New York Times reports that, according to aid organizations, starvation could kill 1 million children this winter. These fatalities could far exceed civilian deaths resulting from 20 years of war.

The United States has frozen $9.4 billion of the Afghan central bank's foreign reserves, making it impossible for the country's financial system to function and threatening to collapse the entire economy.

U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres has pleaded for ``increased liquidity'' to ``free up frozen currency reserves and reengage Afghanistan's central bank'' to ``pull the economy back from the brink.''

Former Republican South Carolina Governor David Beasley, now the head of the World Food Programme, similarly said that unless those Afghan central bank funds are unfrozen, ``this country will absolutely collapse.''

A senior official at the International Red Cross pointedly asked: ``Can the international community hold 39 million people hostage to the fact that they do not want to recognize the authorities that are now in place in Kabul and in Afghanistan?''

If appeals from the world's leading humanitarian and aid organizations on the devastating impacts of current U.S. policy do not persuade my colleagues, I ask them to consider whether Afghanistan's economic crisis will pose an opportunity for neighboring China to expand its influence in the country.

For those seeking to better understand the Chinese Government's influence in Afghanistan and the rise of illicit financial transactions in the country, my amendment would ensure that we have this information.

I urge my colleagues to support this amendment, which simply requires additional information on the impact of U.S. sanctions on Afghanistan's migration, mortality, financial health, and influence from the Chinese Government.

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Ms. JAYAPAL. Madam Speaker, we join the American people in telling the President that he did the right thing by finally ending this never- ending war in Afghanistan.

However, we can't abandon the country and its people. We have to make sure we get aid to the people of Afghanistan in the wake of our 20-year war there.

In addition to the moral urgency of reevaluating a set of economic policies that threaten to harm untold Afghan civilians, including 1 million children, American policymakers deserve to have a complete and comprehensive picture of what is occurring in Afghanistan, including an honest understanding of our own actions, their human impacts, and their political and economic effects.

We must not be afraid to connect the dots. Indeed, this is a pre- condition to changing U.S. policy when it contributes to outcomes that contradict our own interests and our own values. Any report on Afghanistan's financial picture would be gravely incomplete without also examining current U.S. policies.

I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes'' on this amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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