No one with any experience or regulatory memory at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) wanted the regulation of catfish (and its many cousins) transferred from FDA to USDA. USDA’s regulatory requirements are extremely expensive compared to FDA’s, and the transfer would have a relatively minimal health and safety impact. Yet it would have significant cost to the industry and would put the USA at risk of trade litigation with a number of foreign catfish exporters. The only people who were favorably impacted were the members of the Catfish Farmers of America and the few remaining wild-caught catfish operations in the USA.
Transition from FDA to USDA
During the transition period, USDA only allows those foreign catfish operations which are already in the market to export to the U.S. By stopping all the new foreign exporters until it has concluded the equivalence, the USDA program temporarily favors domestic operations. But any benefits U.S. catfishers might have expected were overtaken by the expense involved in bringing the U.S. catfish processing industry within the standards that USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service (FSIS) requires: reconstruction of buildings that fail to meet basic FSIS standards; replacing equipment at high cost to harvesters, transporters, processors and storage facilities; paying the salaries of USDA inspectors with the authority to shut the line down with virtually unhindered discretion – to name just a few of the burdens.
USDA’s foreign equivalence model functions more as a leveraging tool during international trade agreement negotiations than as a meaningful food safety tool. It is true that disallowing the importation of catfish from, say, Vietnam or China (based upon lack of equivalency) you necessarily remove any risk that Vietnamese or Chinese catfish could present a food safety hazard to U.S. consumers. But that argument is true for every food from any country. And implementing it across the board would break the U.S. food supply irretrievably. The fact is: the U.S. cannot feed itself. As it turns out, even limiting this approach to catfish (and other siluriformes, such as pangasius, swai, tra, and basa) might break the bank.
So this catfish may yet have another life to live. As we have reported, Congress is making a move to transfer jurisdiction over siluriformes back to FDA. This conversation continues as the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, weighs whether to hold a vote on a resolution to disapprove USDA’s inspection program, after the Senate passed the resolution in May. USDA’s program will cost about $2.5 million – a $1.4 million increase over the cost of FDA’s program. Not surprisingly, legislators are concerned when the increase does not bring substantially greater food safety benefits.[1]
One Monolithic Food Agency?
The idea that it would be better and simpler to create a single monolithic food agency resurfaces every 7-10 years in the federal government. Bureaucrats love the idea because it gives the appearance of doing something. It also gives the sense that there is at least someone to blame when something goes awry. But when was the last time a government official was held responsible for a blunder that cost companies or consumers millions, billions, their health, confidence in government oversight, or even their lives? Making one food agency just makes it easier for so many more bureaucrats to hide among the rearranged deck chairs.
FDAImports.com Founder and CEO Ben England says, “I agree that when duplication of jurisdiction and efforts can be reduced, pooled services make a lot of sense — but not just among the food agencies. It would be true across the entire federal government and is not limited to food inspection, approval, or permitting agencies. The big challenge, though, is that the different federal agencies have differing missions, expertise, levels of necessary scientific background and, frankly, reasonably different approaches to food safety given the industry, foods, risks associated with them and the protected class (whether consumer, industry, or economy). It’s like making the Prescription Drug User Fee people at FDA supervisors of the new drug application reviewers (not very smart) – so you separate them.”
Releasing catfish back into FDA’s regulatory waters makes sense because it’s where all other seafood is. And there is nothing — absolutely nothing — unique about catfish as a seafood species justifying the special (mis)treatment. Aquaculture catfish presents no greater risk than any other aquaculture species. Wild-caught catfish presents no greater risk than any other wild-caught seafood species. And imported catfish presents no risk to domestic catfish farmers or wild-caught operations. Imported catfish do not pose a threat to domestic catfish species. Although the domestic industry may struggle to compete against foreign processors, using that as the primary benefit for the break-the-bank policy decision to impose USDA jurisdiction applies just as well to all other seafood species — and will drive costs of seafood even higher with no identifiable food safety benefits.
Congress should move the jurisdiction to regulate catfish back to the FDA and free it from USDA’s snare.
