Senate votes to kill USDA catfish inspection program

However, the USDA's proposed rules were delayed repeatedly by the OMB and the White House, as implementing a rule aimed at blocking pangasius imports could have sparked a major trade war with Vietnam, and hurt US meat and agricultural exports. The latest USDA proposed rules, released earlier this year, did not make a final determination as to which species would be covered by an equivalency requirement - that an exporting country have a USDA type continuous inspection system approved.

The political stalemate was broken in the Senate when opponents, led by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ), were strongly supported by a recent GAO report highly critical of the USDA program.

NFI, which has vigorously opposed the USDA's authority to regulate catfish since 2008, issued a statement praising the vote.

"Common sense has prevailed in the Senate. [This] is a return to fiscal sanity at a time when controls on wasteful government spending are much needed. The voice vote passage of the amendment illustrates the Senate's strong desire to fix this problem.

"The bipartisan effort to repeal the program, with supporters from every corner of the country, took into account not only the agricultural trade implications raised by this program but the waste associated with a regulatory approach that sought to spend millions without actually improving food safety."

Basically, the GAO said it was a waste of government resources to move catfish inspection to the USDA and recommended Congress repeal the program.

According to a summary in Food Safety News, the GAO report questions whether the USDA inspection program would improve food safety, pointing out that federal regulators are using "outdated and limited" information in their risk assessment, upon which the inspection program would be based. The GAO notes that, in the risk assessment, FSIS identified just one outbreak of Salmonella, which occurred in 1991, but the incident "was not clearly linked to catfish." This was before the FDA's 1997 HACCP program came into force. According to GAO, no catfish-linked Salmonella outbreaks have happened since. The report also said "Other federal agencies questioned if FSIS (USDA) had adequately demonstrated a Salmonella problem in catfish.” For example, neither FDA nor NMFS have such concerns.

NMFS and other federal agencies have argued that it is more likely that chemical and drug residues in farm raised catfish are potential hazards, but the OMB told FSIS that Salmonella was the most practical hazard to evaluate, because of the strong data on Salmonella-linked deaths and illnesses in the United States, according to the report.  There is not data on the health effects, if any, of the small amounts of chemical or drug residues that have been detected in some samples.

In 2002, imported catfish made up around 2 percent of the U.S. market and by 2010 imports accounted for 23 percent of the market, according to GAO. The GAO said that more fragmentation and overlap is not what the federal food safety system needs. On top of the illogical jurisdictional lines it would create, GAO says the move would cost taxpayers more. The program would provide continuous inspections of domestic processing processing and it would require the same for imported catfish, which only makes up 3 percent of imported seafood.

For US catfish plants, it would mean three federal agencies would have overlapping inspection authority in the same plant: FSIS, FDA, and NMFS. USDA estimated it would cost taxpayers $14 million each year. Between 2009 and 2011, the agency spent $15.4 million in the developing the program and is slated to spend $4.4 million more in FY 2012.

A similar repeal amendment has been introduced in the House with bi-partisan support, by Reps. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO), Jack Kingstom (R-GA).

If the House accepts a similar repeal, the five year uncertainty about catfish imports, and the access of US consumers to farm raised white fish, will no longer be under threat.