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
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catfish inspection
Bills Introduced to Cut USDA's Catfish Inspection
Bipartisan groups in the U.S. House and Senate introduced bills on Thursday that aim to eliminate the development of a catfish inspection program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture that they call redundant and wasteful. In the House, Congresswomen Vicky Hartzler (R-MO) and Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-CA) introduced H.R. 1313, while…
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Catfish Industry Flounders Despite Congressional Support
Earlier this month Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran sent a letter to Rebecca Blank, the acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce, asking that the Department “vigorously enforce the antidumping order against frozen fish fillets from Vietnam.” The fish Cochran is concerned about is catfish, and his concerns are not …
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Senate Passes Farm Bill
In a rare show of bipartisanship, the Senate passed the farm bill on Thursday by a vote of 64 to 35. The bill, which sets the nation’s agriculture and nutrition policy for the next five years, would end direct payments for commodity crop farmers, but ramp up subsidized crop insurance…
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Senate Farm Bill ‘Vote-o-rama’ Rejects Catfish Inspection Program
The Senate was hard at work Tuesday considering dozens of farm bill amendments in an hours-long “vote-o-rama” that included repealing a 2008 farm bill provision to create a catfish inspection program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Unless the House decides that the program — which the Government Accountability Office …
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McCain Takes Aim at ‘Senseless’ Catfish Inspection Program
Senator and former presidential contender John McCain (R-AZ) is at war against “senseless” measures in the farm bill and the pending catfish inspection program is on his list of top targets. On the floor Thursday, Sen. McCain mocked a variety of farm bill programs, including a $15 million grant program…
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