The price of wild-caught catfish has slowly increased over time. In 2020, the USDA bought $30 million in domestic farm-raised catfish for food banks, supporting the farm-raised industry however, it left wild-caught catfish out in the cold. Many catfish farmers held on to fish that are now too big to sell, having outgrown saleable size limits during the pandemic. Processing plants saw historic staff shortages restaurant sales plummeted, which provided more than half of some producers’ incomes contracts were cancelled feed prices went up and holding fish in ponds increased costs. Today, imports from Vietnam and China still account for nearly half of all farmed catfish sales in the US, showing continued robust competition and a slight downturn due to the pandemic.ĬOVID-19 has created unprecedented challenges for the catfish industry. According to US Census, NOAA and USDA data, the average value of domestic and imported farmed catfish sales combined per year over the last 10 years totaled approximately $350 million. Foreign imports of catfish, often labeled basa, swai or tra, still have a stronghold on the market. What’s worse, since 2016-when USDA oversight began-the provision has done little to help the farm-raised catfish market it intended to protect. Maryland overturned the regulation in April 2021, but for years, politicians have pushed against the controversial USDA inspection program to no avail. They were packing their own catfish, but now they can’t do it because they’re not USDA-approved.” Nixon Fisheries in North Carolina, one of only a few processors left in North Carolina and Virginia who take wild-caught catfish. “It was a lot of heartache and a lot of money to upgrade to new standards,” says Ricky Nixon of Murray L. The USDA inspectors’ high pay rates, upward of $70 an hour, and stringent facility requirements makes processing wild-caught catfish cost prohibitive for processors. The FDA program had only cost taxpayers $700,000 annually. The cost? According to a USDA spokesperson, in 2018, Congress increased the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service’s annual funding by $5.5 million to cover the expenses of the extra workload. The provision took away the responsibility of inspecting catfish from the FDA and required on-site USDA inspectors at all catfish processing plants, both wild-caught and farmed. Lobbyists such as the Catfish Farmers of America, a group of farm-raised catfish producers in Mississippi, pushed through a provision in the 20 Farm Bills to distinguish farm- or channel-raised catfish from cheaper, imported catfish, which threatened their sales. And as blue catfish numbers increase, to the detriment of other species it gobbles up such as the blue crab, it’s important as ever to keep on fishing. It’s no wonder that so many Chesapeake fisherfolk have relied on the abundant catfish for an income. With high reproductive rates and few predators, the blue catfish makes up approximately 70 percent of the fish biomass-more than 100 million wild catfish-in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Virginia introduced the blue catfish for recreational fishing in the 1970s, but now there’s no putting the cat back in the bag. Those golden fried fillets of white, flaky meat dipped in cornmeal and flour with a sprinkle of Old Bay, and the catfish chowder my mother makes from scratch, taste better than any fish I know. Even today, I can reel in a dozen blue catfish in less than an hour, more than enough to feed a family. We could catch dinner in our backyard, which made a difference to us as low-income farmers. I grew up swimming in the muddy Rappahannock River in Virginia where the catfish are so plentiful, sometimes they’d bump right into me, scaring both of us.
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