The Vietnam Association of Seafood Exporters and Producers (VASEP) has said that stricter regulations on catfish imposed by the US will make it difficult to export catfish and pangasius to the US.
VASEP says that the rules will trouble Vietnamese exporters and exporters from other countries, and also affect America's seafood manufacturers.
The US government is at the final stage of preparing for imposing stricter regulations on catfish. The USDA will conduct inspections and monitoring more frequently - even on daily basis, says VASEP. It will directly inspect meat and seafood processing plants instead of the random check method currently applied by US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
VASEP fears that once the regulation is imposed it will cost all US catfish manufacturers millions of dollars. Most US catfish manufactures are mainly found in the southern states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas.
Data from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has revealed that in the past few years, for various reasons, US catfish hatchery areas have halved to about 23,000 hectares from 65,000 hectares in 2008. This is said to be the result of the rise in the price of corn, a major source for fishmeal. In 2008, to protect the domestic catfish industry, the US imposed protection measures and anti-dumping tax on catfish imports from several countries and pangasius imports from Vietnam.
Some US lawmakers, including Senator John McCain and Senator Jeanne Shaheen, have described the plan to transfer catfish inspection from the FDA to the USDA as “wasteful and duplicative”.
