August 27, 2013 — Dick Stevens is a catfish legend in Mississippi.
President and CEO of Consolidate Catfish, Stevens owns one of the biggest catfish processors in the U.S. — in one day, he handles 400,000 pounds of fish.
He is also one of the driving forces for getting the U.S. Department of Agriculture to inspect catfish grown in the U.S. and imported.
Critics call that a huge waste of millions of American tax dollars because that means two agencies are charged with inspecting catfish — the USDA and the Food and Drug Administration.
While the USDA inspects meat, seafood inspections have been conducted by the FDA.
Though Stevens told ABC News he didn’t want two U.S. agencies looking at the same food, there have been concerns in the past about whether the inspection of imported fish has been adequate.
“We would say this is a food-safety concern,” Stevens said.
“We felt like we needed to do something to improve our marketing in the catfish industry. We felt like consumer confidence has been shaken a little bit, with some of the products that were adulterated,” Stevens said. “We felt like our market was going away because people were worried about the safety of the product.”
Stevens said the industry reached out to the USDA’s Agriculture Marketing Services, even though the FDA already handled inspections, which he called “nonexistent.”
Read the full story at ABC News