Ag Committee's Cammack: 'Out of touch' Dems ignore food crisis, fixate on 'Tesla charging stations'

Amid warnings of an upcoming food crisis, Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee are prioritizing the installation of "Tesla charging stations" in rural America, Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) lamented this week.

The United Nations' World Food Programme (WFP) released a report Monday titled "Unprecedented Needs Threaten a Hunger Catastrophe."

"The world cannot afford another conflict as is happening today in Ukraine," the report warned. "The war is a catastrophe, compounding what is already a year of destructive hunger."

"Ukraine and Russia account for a third of the global wheat supply, and over half of WFP's supply of the grain," the report explains. "The crisis in the breadbasket of Europe is driving up the price of wheat as well as maize, sunflower oil and crude oil — with dramatic fallouts for food security worldwide."

If the Russian invasion continues beyond April, "an additional 47 million people" will experience acute hunger, up "from a prewar baseline of 276 million people," WFP noted in another report, released on Wednesday.

"Altogether, this means that up to 323 million people could become acutely food insecure in 2022," the report added.

On Friday, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said the invasion of Ukraine is causing a 17.1% increase in prices for grain, which includes wheat, oats, barley and corn. 

On the John Solomon Reports podcast on Wednesday, Cammack warned of the approaching food crisis as Russia's invasion of Ukraine continues, preventing the latter country from planting crops.

"Ukraine should be planting right now," she said. "They are not planting. So while this would be a typical growing season and a planting season, tractors are being used for the war effort, fuel is being used for the war effort — that is going to be a major, major issue as we move into the fall and the winter, because they will have missed an entire season. There will be no harvest next year."

There will be a "700% increase in fertilizer costs," Cammack predicted. "And when you compound that with fuel prices — it was $5.19 a gallon for diesel in my district just this past weekend. You factor in the regulatory environment that is squeezing our producers to death. This administration has thrown more red tape on them and the threat of new taxes and regulations on producers, and then you basically put a bow on it with a pretty scarce labor market, it's looking pretty grim."

She criticized the "out of touch" Biden administration for pushing green energy policies amid the food crisis.

"I think it's willful ignorance," she said. "They are completely aware of what is coming and what is happening, and yet they continue to march down this path of the so-called Green New Deal, and a renewable energy market."

During a House Agriculture Committee hearing Tuesday, Cammack recounted, she told the undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture that "producers across this country are scrambling to basically put fuel in their tractors, and you want to talk about Tesla charging stations in rural America where they don't have enough money and margins to cover their basic fuel operations, let alone make payroll ... and you want to put charging stations in rural America? I think that that screams how out of touch Washington, and this administration, truly, truly are."

The congresswoman also recalled a recent private meeting that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had with Congress members on the border crisis. "I can tell you that every single member in that room was frustrated, including Secretary Mayorkas," she said. "There was some very, very strong family discussions going on. And there is just an exasperation, I think, on his part. You get the sense that he feels boxed in."

Cammack said she told Mayorkas that her husband, who's a firefighter, had responded to three overdoses the night before.

"[T]he crime has been skyrocketing, the narcotics pouring into the community are just overflowing," she said. "It is incredibly dangerous for first responders today because of this administration's open border policies and their defund police movement. This is tremendously scary.

"And in that meeting, I wanted him to understand that this is very real, it is not a far away, removed situation, but it's something that's very real and present in every community."