Taxpayers on the Hook with New Catfish Regulation

Hillbilly Handfishin’ and River Monsters are two television reality programs that show the struggle of catching catfish.  At the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and in the halls of Congress there is another catfish struggle.  This one is between those that want to save an unnecessary bureaucracy and those that want to downsize government and save taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.  According to an April 29, 2012 article in The Hill, “As the 2012 farm bill moves to the Senate floor, a scuffle has intensified over the inspection of catfish.  The battle pits the southern catfish industry and its supporters against a wider coalition of agriculture groups and fiscal conservatives.’  Last year Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) led the fight against the new regulation.  This year, they continue the battle joined by a group of 17 senators from both sides of the political aisle.

Even though seafood is inspected by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), there is a move to have foreign catfish put under the purview of the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) inspection regime.  While this may sound benign, it is a move that could drive up prices, add layers of bureaucracy to an industry that doesn’t need it and burden taxpayers with yet another expensive bureaucracy which could cost up to $30 million. 

After all is said and done, the move will not increase the safety of catfish and the addition of another inspection program would force the hiring of 90 inspectors and eventually spawn a new government inspection bureaucracy that will end up costing hundreds of millions.

According to an April 24, 2012 bipartisan letter to Senate Agriculture, Nutrition & Forestry Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), “And beyond the fiscal implications, the catfish program has caused considerable concern among trade experts.  According to them, the program would create a discriminatory de facto ban on exports from key trading partners and expose us to retaliation….We are aware that no scientific data that catfish, imported or domestic, pose any greater food safety risk than other farmed seafood – all of which will remain under FDA regulation.”

A March 23, 2011 Associated Press (AP) article noted that “a rise in cheaper Asian imports over the past decade, most recently from Vietnam, has fueled a series of ‘catfish wars’ between domestic and foreign producers.  After winning tariffs and strict labeling restrictions against the Vietnamese fish, the U.S. industry pushed through what could be a death blow with the inspections law in the 2008 farm bill. The law made catfish the only seafood in the U.S. to fall under USDA’s purview…”

Because USDA requires onsite inspections of facilities, foreign catfish producers would have to comply and that could take years, potentially killing their industry.  Besides the anti-free market tenor of the regulation this would be giving the USDA authority to inspect a food that it has no history of inspecting.

The Government Accountability Office weighed in on the dispute in March, 2011 when it stated that “Oversight is also fragmented in other areas of the food safety system. For example, the 2008 Farm Bill assigned USDA responsibility for catfish, thus splitting seafood oversight between USDA and FDA. Although reducing fragmentation in federal food safety oversight is not expected to result in significant cost savings, new costs may be avoided by preventing further fragmentation, as illustrated by the approximately $30 million for fiscal years 2011 and 2012 that USDA officials had said they would have to spend developing and implementing the agency’s new congressionally mandated catfish inspection program.”

The March 23, 2011 AP article noted that this may be more about politics rather than safety, “’It’s everything that’s wrong about the food-safety system,’ said David Acheson, a food-safety consultant and former assistant commissioner at the Food and Drug Administration. ‘It’s food politics. It’s not public health.’”

The Farm Bill is going to be full of opportunities to cut spending and show the American taxpayer that Congress is serious about fiscal reform.  Eliminating the catfish program is a great place to start and if Congress fails to eliminate this new regulation taxpayers will be up this creek without a paddle.