US Bans Chinese Farmed Fish Imports In Growing Contamination Scandal

Channel catfish farm-raised in China is finding the channel to customers in the United States market more difficult to maneuver these days.

FDA acts after southern states and Wal-Mart ban sales of catfish containing antibiotics or melamine – in order to protect the public, and the domestic industry. But federal action also includes shrimp and other farmed species. Meanwhile, Vietnamese industry concerned.

In response to a number of complaints, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has barred sale of catfish and five other types of farm-raised fish and seafood from China until and unless it can be cleared by US inspection, due to repeated instances of contamination from unapproved animal drugs and food additives.

Mega-retailer Wal-Mart and several Southern states had already prohibited sale of Chinese catfish after detecting illegal antibiotics. Until the FDA action detaining imports was announced June 28, the agency didn’t appear to be pressing the issue – although it later said it had been having problems for years, and took action only after failing to get any cooperation from China.

Besides catfish, the FDA ban covers basa (a variant of catfish), shrimp, eel and dace (a type of carp). The move may have a severe impact on China, the world’s biggest producer of farm-raised fish. The country is also the biggest foreign supplier of seafood to the United States, accounting for 22% of the total imports. But some 60% of all product recalls in the US, food and non-food, are said to involve Chinese products.

The banned substances found in some imported fish, primarily antifungals and antibacterials, have been used by some Chinese farmers to prevent disease among cultured marine species. Because they are often crowded into ponds, farmed fish and shrimp can become sick as the quality of the water becomes polluted by waste and feed.

The FDA said it decided to act after years of warnings and even a visit to Chinese fish ponds resulted in no improvement. Still, Dr. David Acheson, its assistant commissioner for food protection, stressed that the seafood posed no immediate health threat, though long-term consumption could result in health problems.

“There’s been a continued pattern of violation with no signs of abatement,” Dr. Acheson said. The seafood announcement came after a string of reports in recent months about Chinese imports that have failed to meet American health and safety standards: pet food ingredients, toothpaste, toy trains and tires. People even died in Panama from Chinese cough syrup laced with diethylene glycol, which is normally used in automobile anti-freeze.

Until June 28, the primary concern of US officials on imported catfish had seemed to be alleged mislabeling of Vietnamese basa as “catfish.” On June 7, the Justice Department arrested two men for conspiracy to import millions of pounds of falsely labeled fish. Ten seafood companies and six individuals were implicated, the department said. Prosecutions are based on a law passed a few years ago to curb Vietnamese imports by simply declaring that basa aren’t really catfish.

 Concern – and Praise

The ban on allegedly contaminated Chinese seafood fueled concerns about not only the integrity of Chinese products, but the effectiveness of the American system for identifying contaminated food. “The list continues to grow of Chinese imports that are dangerous to American consumers,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois. “There reaches a point where I think it’s clear, if China wants to live in the 21st Century, then they have to produce to those standards.”

The action drew the immediate endorsement of the Global Aquaculture Alliance (GAA), which called for “inspecting farmed seafood at its point of origin and throughout the production process, rather than only testing the end product at the point of entry.” The GAA, said its executive director, Wally Stevens, “has in place some of the most stringent standards in the world, known as ‘Best Aquaculture Practices’ (BAP),” and has proposed that the FDA use them as a means to ensure the safety of fish and seafood entering the United States.

China had been on the defensive for weeks, after reports that 51 people in Panama had died from cough syrup sweetened with anti-freeze. Anti-freeze has also been found in toothpaste from China, and lead paint on toys produced there. Melamine, a chemical put in fish feed because it mimics protein, has been found in some catfish – and has been blamed for the deaths of dozens of cats fed tainted cat food made in China.

After at first denying that there were any serious problems with its food industry, China had the former head of its food and drug inspection agency executed for taking bribes, after announcing a nationwide crackdown on producers of adulterated food. But it also complained that the catfish bans were unfair, and counter banned some US fruit exports. Meanwhile, there was criticism of US enforcement efforts.

“We now inspect less than one percent of the foodstuffs,” said William Hubbar, a retired associate FDA commissioner. “It gives incentive to people in China to cut corners. The exporters in these countries know the FDA system won’t work.” Consumer Reports magazine has complained that the FDA and the Consumer Product Safety Commission are “woefully underfunded.”

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food and Water Watch, dismissed the FDA announcement as window dressing. “We think that the FDA is responding to all the criticism to the lack of inspection for seafood imports,” he said. “We think it falls pretty short of what needs to be done. We’re basically calling for a ban on Chinese seafood until the FDA can inspect what’s coming in.”

Zheng Xiaoyu, former head of China’s State Food and Drug Administration (SFDA), was executed July 10 after being convicted and sentenced May 29 for dereliction of duty and accepting some $850,000 in bribes. An aide, Cao Wenzhang, was also sentenced to death but got a reprieve. Both had been involved in approval of fake drugs, a Beijing court ruled. The case didn’t have anything to do with food – at least, not directly.

In a notice on its website, the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine – China’s main food safety regulator – said it had contacted the FDA about the use of fluoroquinolones, the antibiotics at issue in some of the banned catfish. The Chinese agency asked Washington to “deal with the problem in an objective, scientific and equitable way,” and warned the US against violating World Trade Organization rules by manipulating health standards to protect domestic producers.

The states of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana imposed their bans on catfish from China after tests found traces of fluoroquinolones, used to treat tuberculosis, pneumonia and other illnesses in people and prevent infections in animals. China said that the drugs are allowed in the PRC, the European Union and Japan – and that the FDA allows their use if below concentration levels of five parts per billion. But the FDA said that fluoroquinolones have never been approved for use in aquaculture and any amount detected in fish tissue deems the product adulterated. Regulations against the antibiotics in food are intended to prevent bacteria from developing resistance to the drugs.

For the US farmed catfish industry, which is threatened by cheap Chinese and Vietnamese imports, any bad news for its competitors seemed like good news – at first. But that was before word came out about fish feed with melamine – the same substance implicated in the tainted pet food scandal.

It was a regional FDA office, acting at the request of the Arkansas Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), that had detected melamine in one sample of Chinese catfish. Although the level wasn’t great enough to pose any human health hazards, the DHHS said, the name alone could scare people who have read about cats dying from it. Melamine is a chemical used only in plastics in the USA, but in China it is often added to feed because it can fool tests for protein content.

Tainted Feed, Made in USA

But China isn’t the only source. Two US suppliers of animal and fish feed had to recall their products in May because they contained melamine. Why did they put the stuff in their feed to begin with? Because it makes the pellets hold together better, so they won’t break up in the water before fish and shrimp can nibble on them.

The FDA said the risks to human health were “very small” from eating cattle, sheep, goats, fish or shrimp that might have ingested feed produced by Tembec BTLSR Inc. of Toledo, Ohio, and Uniscope Inc., of Johnstown, Colorado. The amount of melamine in the livestock feed was less than 50 parts per million, and that in fish and shrimp feed less than 233 and 465 parts per million, respectively.

FDA officials said they had not determined how many farms or fisheries had received the contaminated feed. The brands include AquaBond and Aqua-Tec II, which Tembec made and distributed for Uniscope, and Uniscope’s Xtra-Bond. Tembec, which supplied Uniscope with the ingredient, said it reformulated its product in April after receiving news of the problems with the chemical.

Before then, a Tembec executive said the company believed its products were safe. “We assumed we were producing a compliant product for the applications and the markets into which it was going,” said John Valley, an executive vice president for the Toledo subsidiary’s parent company, Tembec Inc. of Quebec, Canada. According to the FDA, much of the feed at issue is exported, so there could be repercussions in other countries.

Some authorities complained that fish contamination was being blown out of proportion. Dr. Robert Cox, director of the Mississippi Poison Control Center, was quoted saying he saw no problem with serving tainted Chinese catfish to his family and children. Cox told The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Mississippi, that a person would have to eat 220,000 pounds of the fish to get a full adult dose of the antibiotic.

 Is It All Just Economics?

Carlos Sanchez, spokesman for Beaver Street Fisheries, a seafood importer based in Jacksonville, Florida, USA, viewed the catfish bans as a political issue in the Southeast, rather than a matter of food safety.

“Overseas companies are not paying for this. It’s American companies that have to pay to have product tested,” Sanchez stated. Those costs drive up the final price of the fish. He supports domestic producers, but also favors “a free market.”

In Louisiana, where the domestic shrimp industry has been buffeted by Hurricane Katrina as well as imports, the FDA action has drawn praise from local officials, but the Louisiana Seafood Board still wants more federal help to get the local industry back on its feet. Whether wild-caught shrimp can ever really compete with farmed shrimp is a troubling issue.

At least 500,000 pounds of Chinese catfish had been imported into Alabama, judging from sampling in February, according to the state inspection service. By comparison, Alabama’s catfish production last year was about 131 million pounds in food-size sales, worth about $99 million. The state has about 23,700 acres in catfish production, compared to about 90,000 acres in Mississippi. Mississippi’s 2006 production was valued at $262.5 million.

Chinese imports can be 70 cents cheaper a pound than US product, complained Jamey Clary, director of the Catfish Marketing Association in Alabama, representing more than half the producers. Clary figured the import ban would have a positive impact on US producers.

“Sales have already picked up,” he said soon after the state bans. “Sales were down pretty drastically when the Chinese thing first hit. The FDA needs to raise their level of inspection on foreign imports, not just from China,” he added.

That includes Vietnam, but that country is having problems that go beyond alleged mislabeling or contamination.

Too Much, Too Soon?

Is the booming business of processing farmed basa (pangasius Hypophthalmus), which pretty much looks and tastes like catfish, growing too fast for Vietnam’s good?

In Vietnam where the sky has seemed to be the limit as far as aquaculture is concerned, experts have warned that a recent increase in the number of tra and basa catfish farms across southern Vietnam could have serious implications for the region’s water supplies if environmental regulations continue to be violated.

According to local authorities in Can Tho and An Giang, farmers all along the Cuu Long (Mekong) Delta provinces are replacing paddy fields with catfish ponds at a rapidly increasing rate – but few seem to be following official environmental requirements. In An Giang Province alone, there are over 200 hectares of new fish farms, according to an initial report.

But Huynh The Nang, deputy chairman of An Giang People’s Committee, said he was in no doubt that the actual number could be much higher. “Almost 75% of the new farms have not included or developed following fish farming promotion plans,” Nang said. “Not only do many of the new farms not meet environmental requirements, but most of them are using the land for a different purpose than the one they applied permission for in the first place,” he added.

Minister of Fisheries Ta Quang Ngoc insisted that his ministry did have a master plan in place which is set to see the country through to 2010. However, setbacks lay in the fact that they could not ascertain how much of the region’s fresh water supplies had already been sucked into the catfish industry.

And this was a problem that involved many other industry sectors, the minister said: “It requires comprehensive coordination with other sectors in areas such as irrigation and industrial development.”
Output of catfish from the Delta provinces is already running ahead of the ministry’s projections, which call for a million tons by 2010. In 2006 alone, the region produced 800,000 tons and if the acceleration continues, the ministry’s target might be reached by the end of this year– three years earlier than previously expected, Ngoc said.