Catfish Farmers Push Fake Food Safety Scare on the Hill

July 22, 2010, Washington, D.C. –The Catfish Farmers of America are shopping a report, paid for by the special interest lobbying group, that seeks to create a food safety scare in order to regulate its competition out of business.  

The National Fisheries Institute has seen the report and offers this analysis: 

• To suggest that this report shows imported panagasius (or catfish for that matter) is a major contributor to antibiotic resistance in the U.S. is an absurd exaggeration. 
• Antibiotics are used in red meat and poultry—products that, combined per capita, Americans eat nearly 200 lbs of annually. Americans eat 0.259 lbs of imported pangasius annually. 
• Import data clearly shows that in the last year a combined total of 8 shipments of pangasius or catfish were refused entry into the U.S. due to “drug residues.” That’s eight shipments out of 507…that’s eight shipments out of nearly 33-million pounds. 
• The report also claims that a study shows imported catfish from Vietnam were “twice as likely as domestic fish to be contaminated by salmonella.” That study from the Mississippi State University, supported in part by a USDA grant, tested 30 of each fish. Despite what they are reporting today when the study was presented at the American Society for Microbiology it was clearly spelled out that “Incidence of Salmonella in farm-raised catfish (33%) and basa (50%) were not significantly different” and that “Both species had microbial quality indices below limits of concern” (see document below.) This is rhetorical and statistical deviance clearly designed to create the impression of a food safety scare where there is none—a very common tactic from these folks. 
• In endorsing the USDA approach, the report notes that freshwater aquaculture should have a regulatory system based on distinctive challenges—it already does. The FDA’s HACCP system has addressed unique hazards and individual interventions for them. The FDA’s risk-based allocation of resources means it already spends more time inspecting aquaculture products than it does others. 
• The report says “safety can not be inspected into a product by the government at a domestic processing establishment or at the port of entry. Rather, effective regulatory and private sector control must extend back to the growing operations.” This appears to be a clear argument for FDA’s HACCP system, a system that would be summarily negated if USDA’s regime were imposed.

Nowhere in the report do they address directly the sanitation of foreign processing plants. Nowhere. Yet they conclude (p19,20) “good sanitation… reduces… contamination” and that “insanitary processing conditions… can be part of the contamination pathway.” Nowhere does the report offer evidence of insanitary processing facilities in other countries.  

This campaign is more of the same from a group that does not mind abusing public trust in an effort to wipe out its competition.

American Society for Microbiology Abstract (DOC)