All Catfish Should be Treated Equally!
Safecatfish.com is committed to supporting laws that protect the health and safety of the American consumer.
Last year 5.2 billion pounds of seafood, including catfish, were imported into the United States from foreign countries. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspected a mere 2% of all those imports. That means, 98% of all those imports made it to our grocery shelves and restaurants with absolutely no FDA health and safety inspections.
Congress voted to fix this problem in the 2008 Farm Bill by shifting the regulation and inspection of all catfish – domestic and imported – to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which has more thorough requirements than the FDA when it comes to food safety.
The USDA has determined there is a clear need for a stronger catfish food safety inspection system. But the USDA now must decide whether to protect all catfish, or just some catfish.
We support the USDA’s stronger option which includes all catfish — described in the regulation as “all species in the order Siluriformes, with the three families typically consumed as food, including Ictaluridae, Pangasius, and Clariidae.