Food Security

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McCORMICK. Madam Speaker, today I address something that is near and dear to everyone's heart, and that is food security.

One of my biggest concerns right now, as I have become educated on the things that concern Americans, is the fact that all around the world right now, we are facing food shortages. A lot of this is created by our own actions.

If you look in Ukraine right now, you have food rotting in bins because of a war. The breadbasket of Europe is not going to be producing crops in the next year because of the war.

In China, you have massive pollution which is contaminating their agricultural output.

Meanwhile, you have countries like India that are reliant on foreign fertilizer that are going to be choked off because of the environmental movement.

You have the Netherlands and Germany reducing their nitrates in their fertilizers, which they haven't done since World War I, which created a famine back then.

In the United States, we have a third of our chickens and our eggs that are being reduced because of Avian Flu.

Meanwhile, we are allowing Chinese nationals and billionaires to buy up millions of acres of farmland. This is concerning for many reasons. If we thought that the pandemic was a reason for government to overreach, if we thought that that was going to be a crisis, imagine what it would be like if we ran out of food, if we have food shortages.

When you realize that we had people panicking over toilet paper, imagine what they will do when they panic when our cupboards are bare. This could be a worldwide reason for war.

It is also another reason for government to increase their control. There is always a reason for people to turn to the government to solve the problems that the government created; and that is my main concern today, to be something proactive rather than reactive.

We see it coming. We can see that any foreign national country could come up with a virus to contaminate our livestock or even our crops; and yet, we are doing nothing to proactively make sure that Chinese nationals can't buy farmland in America; that billionaires can't buy millions of acres of farmland and artificially increase prices during a food shortage.

We, as Congress, need to be proactive. We need to reach out and make sure we are doing things to strategically protect our food resources, both here and abroad.

We need to fight back this idea that the environmental movement shouldn't use fertilizer, shouldn't produce agriculture; shouldn't be having foresight to protect human life over all else.

Madam Speaker, I propose that Congress is realistic in the way we allow people to purchase. I am all for a free market. I am all for allowing people to sell to who they want to; but always with the idea that America still comes first, and Americans are protected in the process; that we don't turn to the government to solve the problem that we are creating, and that we don't allow foreign nationals to affect our food supply because this would be catastrophic, both here and abroad, and would lead to wars, as we have seen over and over through the history of this world.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source