[Vision2020] Number of Catfish Inspectors Drives a Debate on Spending

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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July 26, 2013
Number of Catfish Inspectors Drives a Debate on Spending By RON
NIXON<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/ron_nixon/index.html>

WASHINGTON — Deep-fried catfish served with a side of hush puppies and
coleslaw has been a regional specialty for years and a cash crop for states
in the Deep South. Now, catfish is at the heart of a dispute as the House
and Senate prepare to work out their differences on a new five-year farm
bill. The current bill expires on Sept. 30.

At issue is a little-known provision in the 2008 bill that established an
office within the Agriculture Department to inspect catfish. But those
inspection programs also exist at the Food and Drug Administration and the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at the Commerce Department.

The Agriculture Department has traditionally inspected meat and poultry
while the F.D.A. has inspected all other foods, including seafood.

*Since 2009 the Agriculture Department said that it has spent $20 million
to set up the catfish inspection office, which has a staff of four. The
department said that it expects to spend about $14 million a year to run
it. The F.D.A. spends about $700,000 a year on its existing office. *
* *

* *Despite the cost, the Agriculture Department has yet to inspect a single
catfish.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said the program reeks of
wasteful government spending intended to help one special interest group,
and he has vowed to “deep-fry” the catfish program.

On Monday, Mr. McCain and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New
Hampshire, sent a letter to Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan
and chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, asking her to adopt
language from the House farm bill that eliminates the additional inspection
office. An amendment sponsored by the two senators to cut the program’s
funding was not included in the Senate’s most recent version of the farm
bill.

“There is no reason for taxpayers to be subsidizing a duplicative catfish
inspection program that will cost millions to set up and another $15
million to operate annually,” Ms. Shaheen said. “Eliminating this
duplicative program is a matter of common sense.”

Catfish farmers and producers in Mississippi say their support of a catfish
inspection program at the Agriculture Department is about food safety and
imported catfish.

“The F.D.A. is understaffed and little inspection is done of the fish that
comes into this country,” said Dick Stevens, the president and chief
executive of the Consolidated Catfish Company in Isola, Miss. “Fish raised
in other countries have been found to have drugs in them. We’re just saying
everyone should be held to the same standard.”

But that argument has little sympathy outside of the catfish industry.

A May 2012 Government Accountability Office
report<http://www.gao.gov/assets/600/590777.pdf>called imported
catfish a low-risk food and said an inspection program at
the Agriculture Department would “not enhance the safety of catfish but
would duplicate F.D.A.” and Commerce Department inspections at a cost to
taxpayers. The G.A.O. said a food safety law passed in 2010 would give the
F.D.A. the resources it needed to adequately inspect foreign foods,
including catfish. The Obama administration has called for eliminating the
Agriculture Department’s catfish inspection program.

Most agriculture groups are also opposed to the Agriculture Department’s
catfish inspection program. Groups including the American Soybean
Association <http://soygrowers.com/> and the U.S. Grains
Council<http://www.grains.org/>signed on to a letter supporting repeal
of the program.

Domestic catfish farmers have been hammered in recent years by a
combination of rising feed costs and competition from foreign producers,
particularly Vietnam and China.

Catfish farmers and producers say the industry has shrunk by about 60
percent since its peak a decade or so ago. In the past few years, 20
percent of the catfish farming operations have closed, which producers
attribute to the influx of foreign fish.

The industry has tried to fight back. In 2002, farmers and producers
lobbied successfully for a law to prohibit fish from Vietnam from being
sold and marketed as catfish, unless it was from a species that was found
only in the southern United States.

But that did not stop the flow of fish imports. So, with backing from
Southern lawmakers, the industry fought for the 2008 provision in the farm
bill that would subject catfish to a more rigorous inspection regimen than
the one at the F.D.A.

Gavin Gibbons, spokesman for the National Fisheries
Institute<http://www.aboutseafood.com/>,
a trade group of seafood producers, including catfish farmers, called the
inspection program a backdoor trade restriction.

“What you have is a special interest group trying to use a food safety
scare as a trade barrier,” Mr. Gibbons said. “It’s wholly inappropriate.”

But that has not been enough to sway Southern lawmakers like Senator Thad
Cochran, Republican of Mississippi.

A staunch defender of the domestic catfish industry, Mr. Cochran was
instrumental in getting the inspection provision in the 2008 farm bill.
Mississippi leads the nation in catfish production, and a research facility
at Mississippi State University dedicated to the study of catfish is the Thad
Cochran National Warmwater Aquaculture Center <http://tcnwac.msstate.edu/>.

Mr. Cochran is the ranking member on the Senate Agriculture Committee.
Congressional aides, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he was
instrumental in making sure the McCain-Shaheen amendment to eliminate the
Agriculture Department program, which passed easily in the Senate’s version
of the farm bill in 2012, was not brought up for a vote in this year’s
bill. An aide to Mr. Cochran denied that he killed the amendment. Senator
Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, was the ranking member of the committee
last year.

Mr. Cochran has admonished the Agriculture Department for not establishing
rules to get the catfish program up and running.

“Senator Cochran believes that U.S.D.A. is the proper agency to do the
oversight of these inspections,” said Chris Gallegos, a spokesman for Mr.
Cochran. “We don’t believe that inspection office would be duplicative
because it’s supposed to replace the F.D.A. catfish inspections.”

A spokesman for the Agriculture Department said the agency is continuing to
draft regulations to put in effect the catfish inspection program.

Representative Vicky Hartzler, Republican of Missouri, co-author of an
amendment to kill the Agriculture Department’s catfish program that was
passed in the House farm bill, worried that programs intended to protect
the domestic catfish industry could set off a trade war with Vietnam.

“If implemented, this measure would result in retaliation against our
nation’s farmers and consumers,” said Ms. Hartzler, during a hearing on the
farm bill in May. Ms. Hartzler is a soybean farmer whose state exports soy
and pork to Vietnam.

Mr. Stevens, the Mississippi catfish company president, dismisses those
concerns.

“It’s a smoke screen for those in the seafood industry who don’t want to
undergo the tougher inspections,” Mr. Stevens said. “They are worried that
if they have to undergo a more rigorous standard it would stop the flow of
cheap seafood. The U.S.D.A. needs to stop stalling and implement the law.”

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