The government is telling those who eat farm-raised catfish that in 90 days that food will be safer.

Safer than what? Who reading this knows someone who got a foodborne illness from eating catfish?

Catfish inspection, both domestic and imported, was “given” to the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service in the 2008 Farm Bill. (That is not why I left in 2008, but it sure made leaving easier.) As I have penned before, the Farm Bill left all other fish with FDA. It also left four-legged bison with FDA.

Now, seven long years later, the USDA has announced that the Final Rule was published in the Federal Register (the “bible” according to career bureaucrats in D.C.) on Nov. 25, 2015, and will take effect 90 days later.

In that seven year period of time, the number of acres of catfish ponds in Mississippi, the largest catfish producer in the United States, dropped from 113,000 to 47,000 and the tonnage of live catfish going to slaughter dropped from 600 million pounds to 300 million pounds.

It is not surprising that Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), facing an uphill battle for re-election in 2008, pushed hard for this change that would make imports from Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines fall under the more stringent inspection of the FSIS.

And it is not surprising that one of the reasons for the delay in implementation came from opposition to the change by senators from states that export meat and grains to countries such as Vietnam, which is threatening WTO actions, stating that the change to USDA inspection is totally protectionism brought about by our catfish farmers and their senators.

There will be an 18-month transitional period before all imports must arrive in the United States through one of our ports of inspections and get FSIS inspectors poking, prodding and testing.

It will also be 18 months before U.S. catfish processing plants get daily, continuous FSIS inspector presence.

Wait. What?

No one ever got sick eating domestic, farm raised catfish. Surely the USDA does not mean to impose costly, strict inspection on our poor catfish farmers, already reeling financially from lower priced Asian fish.

And who will write all those HACCP plans, and do all the residue testing? And who will pay that extra cost? This all kind of goes back to what my parents often advised me. Be careful what you ask for, you may not like what you get.

The 2008 Farm Bill, repeated in 2014 with strict timelines for USDA and FSIS, simply created another layer of bureaucracy costing taxpayers millions that will not be available to truly increase the safety of the food we eat.

I don’t eat at certain restaurants because of their bloated, self-serving statements about why they are better because of how their animals are raised that have nothing to do with food safety, which does result in their closure from time to time.

I don’t think I will be eating any catfish in the future either. The smell coming from this bill is just too offensive for my palate.

The farm bill and Sen. Cochran are all about turning catfish into pork.

Turning catfish into pork

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