Reporting from Belzoni, Miss., and Washington — In Vietnam there's a kind of fish that's white-fleshed and whiskered and otherwise pretty darn catfish-like. But in the eyes of the U.S. government, the creatures aren't catfish.
Now fish farmers in the American South fear this government classification will allow the Vietnamese fish to slither around inspection regulations that will soon apply to American catfish.
It's one of many reasons fish farmer Scott Kiker is singing the catfish blues.
Kiker has been forced to shrink his dominion of teeming fish ponds inMississippi from 270 acres a few years ago to about 80 acres today. His operation, like the U.S. catfish industry overall, has been stung by the soaring cost of grain, as well as last year's spike in diesel prices. And the restaurant industry, like the broader economy, is slow enough to make a preacher cuss.
But there is one issue Kiker believes Washington can address: the millions of pounds of Vietnamese fish imported to the U.S. market each year, amounting to what he contends is unfair competition.
Southern catfish farmers believe that problem could be solved if the Obama administration expanded the government's definition of catfish to include the fish from Vietnam.
"They ought to have to do what we have to do. It's not fair," Kiker said.
Kiker, a friendly, ruddy-faced man with a pair of sunglasses perched on his head, recently gave a tour of his aluminum-walled hatchery, lined with troughs full of gelatinous yellow eggs being aerated by small rotating paddles. It is a clean, simple operation -- one that his 12- and 16-year old daughters help run in the summer. It's also closely regulated, using only federally approved water additives and antibiotics.
"Our standards are so high, and they don't have any," Kiker said of the Vietnamese. "That's the bottom line."
That argument is ringing out from the farms of the American Southeast, where catfish -- once a river-dwelling delicacy whose availability was subject to the fisherman's luck -- has evolved since the 1960s into a crucial cash crop.
Some observers in Washington warn that changing the definition of "catfish" may heighten tensions between the U.S. and Vietnam, and possibly ignite a trade war.
"This goes far beyond just the definition of a fish," said Gavin Gibbons of the National Fisheries Institute, a trade group.
