In the fiscal year 2019 budget that sets out to cut domestic programs by almost $700 billion over 10 years, federal food safety has not only escaped the knife but made some small gains.
President Donald J. Trump’s $1.1 trillion discretionary budget proposal adds $9.4 billion to the Department of Health and Human Services, the…
The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) adjusted inspection coverage at catfish slaughter facilities on Sept. 1, the same day an 18-month transition period ended. The transition period’s end marks the full transfer of responsibility for inspecting domestic and imported catfish to FSIS from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The FSIS confirmed it…
The activist group Food and Water Watch is down as a “strong supporter” of the catfish program now underway in USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS). It would, however, like to see more progress and doesn’t like the inclusion of a couple foreign establishments that FSIS has allowed to sign up for catfish inspections.…
A California company has added more than a ton of fish from Vietnam to its ongoing recall, bringing the amount of individually frozen Swai fillets now subject to recall to almost 28,000 pounds. 
The Santa Anna, CA, company — U.S. Cato Holdings Inc. — distributed the newly recalled 2,235 pounds of imported fish to…
Educational sessions on the new rule for inspecting siluriformes, which include catfish, are set for Jan. 21 and 27. The rule goes into effect March 1. 
The U.S. Department of Agriculture published the final rule Dec. 2 in the Federal Register. Staff from the department’s Food Safety Inspection Service will explain what it means…
Long-awaited U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) catfish inspections, mandated by Farm Bills since 2008, will begin next March, according to a final rule establishing an inspection program for fish in the order Siluriformes, including catfish. The final rule, which applies to both domestically raised and imported Siluriformes fish, was developed by USDA’s Food Safety…
If food safety put catfish under USDA inspection, can shrimp be far behind? That question is coming into focus this week after one of USDA’s top two food safety officials told a gathering of food policy wonks on Tuesday that the final rule for the agency’s takeover of catfish inspections is coming “a little into…
The USDA catfish inspection program, first authorized in 2008, is continued in the 2014 farm bill, which also includes a first-of-its-kind “crop insurance” program for catfish farmers. Most of the so-called political experts were predicting it would go the other way. One paid prognosticator went so far as to suggest that “Southern catfish farmers” were…
The House Agriculture Committee voted to repeal a controversial catfish inspection program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture late Wednesday night – a sign the program, which was mandated by the 2008 farm bill to help protect U.S. catfish farmers from cheap imports, may be headed for the chopping block. In the last attempt at…
Buried in President Obama’s nearly 1,500-page budget released this week are two very specific food safety-related requests. The administration wants to keep the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service from inspecting horsemeat or catfish. The horse slaughter issue, which is extremely contentious, is mentioned a few hundred pages into the appendices. The…
