[Ngo-sanrm] Catfish Inspections Pose a Problem for TPP

Thu Nov 14 11:14:20 GMT 2013

*New York Times*<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/14/us/politics/second-catfish-inspection-program-by-us-complicates-pacific-trade-pact.html?_r=0>
New Catfish Inspections Are Posing a Problem for a Pacific Trade Pact

*Catfish farming in Leland, Miss.**James Patterson for The New York Times*
 By RON NIXON<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/ron_nixon/index.html>Published:
November 13, 2013

WASHINGTON — A curious hurdle is threatening to complicate efforts by the
United States to reach a major trade agreement with 11 Pacific nations by
the end of the year: catfish.
   *Workers at a catfish processing plant in Long Xuyen City, Vietnam.
Vietnamese catfish producers say a proposed inspection program backed by
American producers amounts to a trade barrier.*
*Justin Mott for The New York Times*

At issue is a pending new catfish inspection program at the Department of
Agriculture that would replace but cost far more than an existing catfish
inspection program in the Food and Drug Administration. American catfish
farmers say the new inspection program would be more rigorous than the one
at the F.D.A. and is needed to make sure all domestic and imported catfish
is safe to eat.

Vietnam, a large exporter of catfish and one of the nations in the trade
talks, says it is nothing more than a trade barrier in disguise.

“And it’s not even a good disguise; it’s clearly a thinly veiled attempt
designed to keep out fish from countries like Vietnam,” said Le Chi Dzung,
who heads the economics section at the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington.

Last week, Vietnamese trade officials wrote to Secretary of State John
Kerry, the White House and members of Congress and threatened trade
retaliation if the program was not repealed.

“Our government is unwilling to sit by as this program is implemented,” the
trade officials wrote, adding that American exports of beef, soybeans and
other goods to Vietnam could suffer as a result.

Although catfish makes up only a small part of the commerce among the 12
nations involved in the trade talks, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
it is a vital industry to Vietnam, where it accounted for $340 million of
the country’s $1.3 billion in fish exports to the United States last year.

Some 250 million pounds of Vietnamese catfish, called pangasius, was
exported in 2012 to the United States. Here it makes up more than 60
percent of the American market and is blamed for putting many domestic
catfish farmers out of business.

Although trade experts said that catfish alone would not derail a trade
deal, John D. Ciorciari<http://www.fordschool.umich.edu/faculty/John_Ciorciari>,
assistant professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the
University of Michigan, said that “it’s going to be hard for the U.S. to
get any kind of trade concessions while it has a program like this.”

Jeffrey J. Schott <http://www.iie.com/staff/author_bio.cfm?author_id=62>, a
senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in
Washington and the co-author of a book on the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
agreed, adding that of all the countries in the talks, “Vietnam is going to
have to do the most in terms of changing its policies to comply with any
trade agreement obligations.”

In addition to the United States and Vietnam, the countries in the
Trans-Pacific Partnership talks are Canada, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Japan,
Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Australia and New Zealand. Together they
account for about 40 percent of the world economy.

The duplicate catfish inspection program at the Agriculture Department has
its roots in a 2008 farm bill provision won by Southern lawmakers,
primarily Senator Thad Cochran, a Republican from America’s No. 1
catfish-producing state, Mississippi.

Mr. Cochran, the top Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, argued
along with the catfish industry that imported catfish had to be subject to
rigorous inspections and that the Food and Drug Administration should not
be involved.

“The F.D.A. is understaffed and little inspection is done of the fish that
comes into this country,” said Dick Stevens, the president and chief
executive of the Consolidated Catfish Company in Isola, Miss., in an
interview in July. “Fish raised in other countries have been found to have
drugs in them. We’re just saying everyone should be held to the same
standard.”

American food safety groups like Food and Water
Watch<http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/>also support moving catfish
inspections from the F.D.A., which inspects
less than 2 percent of all imported foods, to a tougher system at the
Agriculture Department.

“Many foreign catfish farmers add antibiotics and antifungals that are
banned in the U.S.,” said a Food and Water Watch lobbyist, Tony Corbo.
“That’s a legitimate concern.”

Nonetheless, a May 2012 Government Accountability Office
report<http://www.gao.gov/assets/600/590777.pdf>called imported
catfish a low-risk food and said an inspection program at
the Agriculture Department would “not enhance the safety of catfish.”

In recent years, domestic catfish farmers have been hammered by a
combination of rising feed costs and competition not only from Vietnam but
also from China. The domestic catfish industry has shrunk by about 60
percent since its peak a decade or so ago, and in the past few years some
20 percent of American catfish farming operations have closed.

Unspoken in the catfish dispute is an Agriculture Department regulation
requiring that any country that exports meat or poultry products to the
United States set up a domestic inspection system for that food that is
equivalent to America’s — an expensive and burdensome regulation that
Vietnam says is unnecessary for catfish.

In the meantime, the Agriculture Department has spent $20 million to set up
the catfish inspection office, which so far has a staff of four, but has
yet to inspect a single fish. The F.D.A. spends about $700,000 a year on
its office.

The Agriculture Department’s catfish inspection program would be repealed
in the House version of the current farm bill, but it remains in the Senate
version despite objections from some lawmakers in both parties. The two
chambers are in negotiations to work out their differences to come up with
a new five-year farm bill.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said the program reeks of
wasteful government spending and has vowed to “deep-fry” it, while Senator
Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, has objected to taxpayers
subsidizing “a duplicative catfish inspection program.”

The Obama administration has also called for eliminating the Agriculture
Department’s catfish inspection program.
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