Catfight Over Catfish

There is a battle brewing over catfish.  This is not a debate over fried or poached, this is a debate on government regulation of catfish.  Even though seafood is inspected by the Food and Drug Administration, 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. 

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 a March 23, 2011 Associated Press (AP) article “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 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.”

This fish fight reeks of politics rather than food safety.  The March 23, 2011 AP article also noted that, “’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.’”

Recognizing the absurdity and expense of the new regulation, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) introduced legislation to rescind the provision on March 7, 2011.  Sen. McCain has called the new regulation “nothing more than a protectionist tactic funded at taxpayers’ expense.”

Congress needs to eliminate this new regulation immediately because taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for more bloated bureaucracy.