July, 2001: Publius

By Greg Rushford
Published in The Rushford Report

Mike Hathaway has long experience as a member of Washington’s international trade bar. He’s a former deputy general counsel at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. In the early 1990s, Hathaway was of counsel to Crowell & Moring, where he often teamed up with Doral Cooper, another former high-ranking USTR official who is president of the law firm’s trade subsidiary. These days, Hathaway is a principal associate at Nathan Associates, a respected Washington economic consulting firm. The point: While he is an amiable fellow, when lawyer Hathaway gets on a case, usually somewhere down the line, someone has reason to say, Uh Oh.

Now, Hathaway is setting the hooks into Vietnamese catfish. Or, rather, “catfish,” since not even whiskered bottom dwellers are what they appear to be, once trade lawyers get involved.

Hathaway represents the Catfish Farmers of America, who complain that deceptively packaged, low-priced Vietnamese “catfish” are taking some $30-40 million in annual business away from them. The lawyer is asking U.S. government officials to work out with their counterparts in Hanoi a Catfish Agreement, which he portrays as a relatively free-trade oriented fix to his clients’ problems.

If nothing is done, Hathaway says that his clients — who have political backing from lawmakers in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas — will be forced to turn on the political heat, just as Congress prepares to pass the U.S.-Vietnam bilateral trade accord this year.

One possible action that neither Washington nor Hanoi should relish would be for U.S. catfish farmers to file an antidumping action against Vietnam. While there may be little merit to such an action, even though the Vietnamese product is underselling American catfish in U.S. markets, the mere filing of dumping cases is both expensive and market disrupting. And knowing how the Commerce Department bureaucrats regularly cook the books to slap horrendous antidumping tariffs on “non-market” economies, it is easy to imagine the Vietnamese catfish industry ending up fried. At the very least, an escalating dispute over catfish would foster recriminations that neither country wants.

Hathaway maintains that his clients don’t mind competing with the Vietnamese, but that they do mind that Vietnamese fish has been deceptively labeled. The lawyer holds up a box of “catfish fillets” that he says was made in Vietnam. The box has a picture of a channel catfish on it, and a brand name of “Cajun Delight.” You would think this was from Louisiana, Hathaway says. But there are no Cajun spices, just frozen fish fillets.

Moreover, Hathaway says the Vietnamese fish isn’t even a catfish, but a “basa” or “bocourti” fish. The Asian fish aren’t from the same family of catfish as North American channel cats, he maintains. “North American catfish all look the same, but Asian catfish even look different,” Hathaway declares. “Some of them look more like an eel.” Why, they don’t even have whiskers.

Hathaway took the box with him up to Capitol Hill, showing it to influential senators from catfish states like Richard Shelby and Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Trent Lott and Thad Cochran of Mississippi. The lawmakers were not amused, and have asked U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick to do something about it. “The import of Asian catfish into the U.S. has had a noticeable effect on our economy,” complained Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby in a February 12 letter to Zoellick that was also signed by other lawmakers from the South.

Hathaway says that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has determined that the Vietnamese may call their product “basa catfish” or “bocourti catfish,” but they cannot call it “Vietnamese catfish,” or just catfish. “That would give the impression it was a channel cat grown in Vietnam, which is false,” he asserts.
Carl Haring, who owns a restaurant in Wisner, Louisiana, told the Associated Press that Vietnamese basa has “a little different texture, is tougher and has a coarser taste. But the average fish-eater couldn’t tell the difference.”

Hathaway says that his clients feel that they can compete with the Vietnamese “basa” fish, if it is properly labeled. “What we care is that it comes in and is misrepresented as catfish, when it isn’t,” he states. He adds that he also has reason to believe that the FDA is investigating reported instances of Vietnamese fish being put into boxes labeled “U.S. channel catfish.”

Such vigilance should be enough. But for the U.S. catfish farmers, the practical problem is that agencies like the FDA and U.S. Customs have precious few resources to devote to preventing mislabeling of catfish-like products. Therefore, Hathaway is asking U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick to negotiate a bilateral accord on catfish with Vietnam.

Enough already.

A Catfish Agreement? The United States presses communist Vietnam for more than five years to enter into a market-oriented trade accord with the United States, and the first thing we do is crack down on catfish? An agreement that would restrain trade with quotas? What kind of a signal does this send?

Moreover, catfish is part of Vietnam’s rich culture. “Catfish in Black Bean Sauce” is a far more sophisticated dish than the deep-fried version that Americans are (ugh) served. I happen to be currently reading Catfish and Mandala, a gracefully written memoir by Andrew X. Pham, a Vietnamese American in search of his cultural identity. There are catfish in Pham’s book, not “basa” fish or whatever. It appears that in Vietnamese minds, a catfish really is a catfish.

Despite the U.S. catfish farmers’ complaints about deceptive advertising, clearly not all Vietnamese (cat) fish sold in U.S. markets are mislabeled. I checked around, and found that the Kroger store in Lake Charles, Louisiana has been selling frozen “Basa Fillets” for $5.99 a pound. The Basa fillets compete with American “Fresh Farm Raised Catfish Nuggets,” — which have been offered at $1.59 per pound.

Go into Ana Mandara, the San Francisco restaurant owned by actor Don Johnson (Nash Bridges), and you see “seared Mekong Basa (catfish)” on the menu. Chef Khai Duong, a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu Academic Culinaire de Paris, gets his catfish from the Mekong Delta, a call to the restaurant reveals.

Sounds like the Vietnamese are going to keep competing.

But the Catfish Farmers of America — for whom channel cats are a $400 million-plus annual business — aren’t about to back off. They have a lot of support in communities in the South that depend upon their catfish. This is the largest aquaculture business in the United States, bigger than salmon and trout, Hathaway says.

Hungry from writing this, I went to the nearest Asian grocery story near my home in Virginia, and asked for catfish from Vietnam. Sure enough, there was a clear plastic package of “Frozen Small Cat Fish,” with a picture of a fish that looked like a catfish, whiskers and all. Inside were four fish that looked like catfish, whiskers and all. The label said the fish was a product of Thailand, but there were also markings on the package in Vietnamese.

“No matter,” the proprietor said. “Vietnam catfish, Thailand, Cambodia, Philippines, it’s all the same.”

Maybe the Catfish Farmers of America should seek a Catfish accord with all of Southeast Asia.

Uh Oh.

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