Senator Kerry Statement on Amendments to End Duplicative Catfish Inspection Program

The USDA subsequently published a proposal to create a Catfish Inspection Office to carry out that mandate.  That proposal, however, is properly stalled in the regulatory process because it serves no public interest, and is onerous, costly for taxpayers, and would invite trade retaliation abroad. 

Senator McCain and I, along with a strong bipartisan group of our colleagues are offering Amendment Number 2199 to repeal the 2008 catfish language.  If we do not repeal it, the USDA intends to move forward and we have a responsibility to prevent this regulatory train wreck before it happens.

Creating a Catfish Inspection Office and a duplicative system of inspection and regulation for catfish is an indisputably bad idea without any safety or consumer benefit.  In February of 2011, the GAO cited the proposed program as part of its report on those that were at high risk for waste, fraud and abuse.  Then in March of 2011 the GAO again called it “duplicative” as part of another report.  And then just last month, the GAO produced an extensive and detailed analysis of why this program is not only costly and duplicative, but would provide us with no additional safety benefit.

The truth is that the program was created in 2008 to protect Southern catfish producers from fair competition from imported fish.  It was targeted in particular at fish coming from Vietnam.  And its sole goal was to create so many procedural hurdles that investment in facilities to process the imported fish in my state would dry up and the price for domestically raised catfish could stay artificially high.  That may be good for Southern catfish producers, but it is bad for consumers and very bad for seafood processors, jobs, and communities from Gloucester to New Bedford.

Playing games with rules, regulations, and agencies that way is bad governance and we do not accept it when our trading partners abroad try to do it.  And allowing it here in America will have repercussions abroad for our exports.  That is why we have the support of a wide range of agricultural interests for this amendment. 

As Chairman Baucus has pointed out, "U.S. agricultural products, including safe, high-quality Montana beef, face unscientific trade restrictions in many important markets.  If we expect other countries to follow the rules and drop these restrictions, it is critical that we play by the rules and do not block imports for arbitrary or unscientific reasons."

The only reason the bad idea codified in 2008 is not yet an active program is that the bill did not define the word catfish.  As a result, for the last four years, fish importers, domestic catfish producers, scientists, lawyers, lobbyists, public relations firms, regulators, foreign governments, legislators, and multiple Cabinet officials have engaged in a definitional debate over what qualifies a fish to be called a catfish and subsequently subject to the new regime. 

It turns out that whether a fish is or is not a catfish is something experts can debate for hours.  It also turns out that it doesn’t really matter and we have wasted an immense amount of people’s time and money arguing over it. 

According to the GAO, the FDA should retain jurisdiction over all fish, catfish and non-catfish alike.  To make where it stands as clear as possible, the GAO titled its May 2012 report, “Responsibility for Inspecting Catfish Should Not Be Assigned to USDA.”  In that report, they argue that as proposed, the USDA catfish inspection program that the 2008 law mandated would “further divide responsibility for overseeing seafood safety and introduce overlap at considerable cost” estimated at about $30 million.

The GAO report further states, “We recognize that the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service developed this program because it was mandated to do so by the 2008 Farm Bill, before FDA received enhanced regulatory authority under the Food Safety Modernization Act.  Even so, the proposed a program essentially mirrors the catfish oversight efforts already underway by FDA and the National Marine Fisheries Service.  Furthermore, since FDA introduced new requirements for seafood processing facilities, including catfish facilities, in 1997, no outbreaks of illnesses caused by Salmonella contamination of catfish have been reported... Consequently, if implemented, the catfish inspection program would likely not enhance the safety of catfish but would duplicate FDA and NMFS inspections at a cost to taxpayers. With FDA’s new authority under FSMA, the federal government has an opportunity to enhance the effectiveness of the food safety system of all imported seafood, including catfish, and avoid the duplication of effort and costs that would result from FSIS’s implementation of its proposed catfish inspection program.”

That is pretty clear cut.  

Let’s repeal the 2008 Farm Bill language related to catfish and let the consumer decide from all the safe food options that exist which he or she wishes to consume.  Let’s let importers creating jobs in America processing and distributing fish from abroad do their job.  And let’s not artificially protect producers in one part of America from fair competition from another. 

I have nothing against catfish related jobs in the South, but they are no more important than jobs processing and distributing imported catfish in Massachusetts.  Let’s bring the catfish chronicles to a close and repeal the 2008 language.

Sen. John Kerry fights wasteful, duplicative USDA catfish inspection program: