Water Week

Floor Speech

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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.

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