Small-scale catfish companies in the United States are being hurt by U.S. Department of Agriculture inspections lobbied for by major domestic producers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service developed its catfish food safety inspection program at a cost of around USD 20 million (EUR 17 million) after lawmakers in the U.S. Southeast successfully lobbied for a transition of the program away from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which oversees all other seafood inspections.
Advocates of the switch said the USDA’s monitoring would be more vigorous and would stamp out the use of chemicals in fish that might cause illness in humans. But in 11 separate reports, the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which calls attention to wasteful spending by the federal government, deemed the USDA catfish inspection program “unnecessary, wasteful, and based on faulty science,” according to the WSJ.
The program has also resulted in Vietnam – the world’s largest producer of pangasius, which is part of the siluriformes catfish family – filing a complaint with the World Trade Organization, alleging unfair trade practices.
The USDA inspections are also having a deleterious effect on small-scale catfish producers in the U.S., which collectively account for four percent of U.S. catfish production, according to the National Fisheries Institute, the national seafood trade board.
Berwick, Louisiana-based Crappell’s Fish Market, has had to buy a label-maker and color-code its shovels, according to owner Penny Crapell. Sean Bergen, the founder and CEO of Portland, Maine-based Sustainable Seafood Sales LLC, said his partnership to bring in fresh catfish from the Dominican Republic “quickly became unsustainable” as a result of the USDA inspection program. The small South American country of Guyana also said its catfish export industry is no longer viable as a result of the program, the WSJ reported.
In response, the USDA said it warned foreign suppliers of the changes “well in advance of new requirements being phased in,” according to the WSJ.
But NFI spokesman Gavin Gibbons said there is fear in the industry that the increased regulatory burden of USDA inspections could be added to other species of seafood besides pangasius in the future.
“It could be crab tomorrow. It could be tilapia. It could be shrimp,” Gibbons told the WSJ.
Mississippi State University’s Delta Research and Extension Center Director Jimmy Avery said the intention of pushing for oversight of catfish from the FDA to the USDA was not to hurt small-scale domestic producers.
“They just got caught up in the net,” Avery said.
Photo courtesy of Crappell's Fish Market
