Faux food safety commercial latest ploy to scare consumers

Washington, DC October 20, 2010 With furrowed brow and overacted artificial sincerity the Catfish Farmers of America (CFA) have launched a television commercial designed to distort the safety of imported seafood.

Filled with half-truths and hypocrisy the ad continues a tradition of self-serving CFA flip-flops. They insist that Vietnam sends 100 million pounds of catfish to the U.S. each year. This is the same organization that lobbied Congress in 2002 to ensure Vietnamese fish could not be called catfish. The Catfish Institutes former president famously said, that fish and ours are as close taxonomically as a house cat and a cow.” Now theyre back telling Americans the Vietnamese fish is once again a catfish. Except when they are not like in 2010 where, in several southern states, CFA lobbied to define it as not a catfish.

The ad repeats an anti-competition mantra about the percentage of imports that are inspected and totally ignores the fact that the highly-effective, integrated system set up by FDA to regulate imported seafood is designed to prevent food safety problems well before the product gets here, rather than simply relying on inspections. This system, known as seafood HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point) is so successful, bipartisan draft food safety legislation expands it to other food groups.

This is just another sad chapter in a special interests effort to keep choices from the American consumer. Imported fish undergoes the same strict safety controls that domestic catfish has undergone for more than ten years. In the past decade seafood, both imported and domestic, has enjoyed an excellent food safety record because the public health professionals regulating seafood at the Food and Drug Administration know their jobs. Claiming this is anything other than a trade issue is as laughable as the exaggerated concern seen in this ad, said John Connelly, president of the National Fisheries Institute.

CFA recently hired a Washington lobbying group that boasts about how its team diverted focus to government standards, rather than their client, Jack in the Box, after four young children died and hundreds became sick from eating at the restaurant chain. Is this the commitment to food safety CFA endorses?

For more than 60 years, the National Fisheries Institute (NFI) and its members have provided American families with the variety of sustainable seafood essential to a healthy diet. For more information visit: www.AboutSeafood.com.