Legislating Catfish Follies

I’ve often stated that laws are made for stupid people, which is true.  Laws are also often made to make one thing or another legal or illegal, or to make something that it is, is not.  Case in point, catfish.

You see, here in the United States, catfish farming is one of the largest aquaculture businesses, and the catfish farmers in the U.S., who felt that the Vietnamese were horning in our there business, wanted to put a stop to the Vietnamese catfish coming into America.  So what did the American catfish farmers do, they made nicey nice with the powers that be and had a federal law passed in 2002 which stated that Vietnamese catfish were not catfish but some unfamiliar fish such as pangasius, which is a member of the catfish family.

Unfortunately for American catfish farmers, their attempt to curtail Vietnamese catfish from making it to the American market did not work so well, and since that did not work, the catfish farmers now want the Vietnamese’s pangasius to be leglislated back into a catfish, in the hope that this new law will curtail the Vietnamese’s horning in on their catfish business.

So after years of arguing that the Vietnamese fish isn’t catfish — and winning a federal law saying as much — the U.S. farmers are now trying to have it both ways. Under their latest lobbying strategy, they want the Vietnamese imports considered catfish so that they will be covered by a new inspections regime that they pushed through Congress last year.

So a catfish is only a catfish if the State decrees it’s a catfish, and that’s only after the State’s been suckered by the catfish farmers once again.

THE INFLUENCE GAME: A catfish by any other name

Posted by on 06/30 at 01:09 PM

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