WASHINGTON — Each year, Joey Lowery, a catfish farmer in Newport, has let more of his growing pools dry up as cheaper, imported fish take a larger share of his market.
Since catfish and similar species called basa and tra began arriving in large volumes from China and Vietnam over the past decade, Lowery has pulled the plug on 15 ponds on his 400-acre farm.
The foreign-grown fish are not only cheaper, Lowery said, but they’re also a potential health hazard.
On Thursday, Lowery, who is the president of the Catfish Farmers of America, made his case on Capitol Hill. A study his group commissioned by Exponent Inc., an international science and engineering consulting firm, found that fish imported from Vietnam were grown in potentially contaminated water, possessed an increased risk of the presence of salmonella and sometimes had the presence of anti-microbial drugs that are illegal in the United States.
Lowery would like to see imported-catfish inspections moved from the Food and Drug Administration to the U.S. Department of Agriculture - arguing that the USDA standards are stricter. Congress directed the shift in 2008 when it updated farm policy, but the Office of Management and Budget and USDA have not completed the necessary steps to make the change.
“All of the foreign countries claim to be putting out safe products,” he said. “If they are, inspection shouldn’t bother them at all. A USDA stamp would help them.”
U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat of Arkansas who is chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, agreed.
“Each day the USDA delays, is another day we put the health of Americans at risk,” she said.
But others claimed that the catfish farmers are simply attempting to unfairly squash foreign competition.
The report is nothing more than a “food-safety scare,” according to the National Fisheries Institute, a Washington group that promotes free trade and seafood safety and nutrition.
“There’s no reason to go from the FDA to the USDA from a food-safety standpoint,” said Gavin Gibbons, spokesman for the National Fisheries Institute.
Gibbons said that both domestic and imported fish have been required to follow FDA rules for 40 years. Domestic farmers didn’t complain, he said, until cheaper imports started getting a toehold in the U.S. market.
“Now, all of the sudden, the FDA is bad and the USDA is good,” he said. “They want to use the USDA system as a barrier to trade.”
Gibbons said that because of the small amounts of catfish people usually eat annually,claims made in the report that anti-microbial drugs used in their cultivation could contribute to antibiotic resistance in the United States are “an absurd exaggeration.”
He also pointed to data from a Mississippi State University study cited in the report. The data showed that the incidence of salmonella in imported basa was nearly twice as high as in farm-raised catfish, but noted that each was “below limits of concern.”
Gibbons said the FDA and the USDA inspection processes were equivalent.
Tony Corbo, head of food related regulatory issues at Food and Water Watch,a Washington environmental group that advocates for food safety, disagreed. The FDA, through its Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points system, sets up processes that growers and importers must follow. He said the USDA system, which relies more on on-site government inspections, is more preventive.
In a March letter to former Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orzag, U.S. Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., complained that trade negotiations with Vietnam - an Obama administration priority called the Trans-Pacific Partnership - had led to “stonewalling” on shifting authority to the USDA.
Said Lowery, the catfish farmer: “Trade should never trump the health and safety of the American people.”
Front Section, Pages 3 on 07/23/2010