March 16, 2014 — The USDA says a foreign-owned company that catches some of its tuna on foreign-flagged boats and cans the tuna mostly with foreign workers who make less than the U.S. minimum wage qualifies as "American." But two foreign-owned companies that can their tuna with American workers is "un-American."
Nutritionists say fish is brain food, so you might think the U.S. government would make it available in school cafeterias. Yet for some three years tuna has been hard to come by when the bell rings for lunch across America. This absurdity is brought to you by the Department of Agriculture's "buy American" policy for school lunches.
The only tuna that qualifies for "buy American" is StarKist. But in March 2011 the Food and Drug Administration inspected StarKist's American Samoa processing operation and found it wasn't up to health standards.
Two other large tuna suppliers, Bumble Bee Foods and Chicken of the Sea International might have stepped in. But they're not allowed to bid because their fish can be landed on vessels that are not U.S. flagged and the skinning, gutting and boning of their catch is done in Thailand. Apparently that makes it un-American. Never mind that the tuna loins are still sent to the U.S. where workers add 80% of the value of the final canned product. Or that those jobs—1,000 or so—in California and Georgia tend to pay between $12 and $18 an hour.
The fish tale gets more preposterous. StarKist takes its haul from the same Asia-Pacific waters as its competitors on both U.S.- and foreign-flagged ships. But the company says its tuna are segregated and only fish landed on U.S. vessels qualify for USDA purchases. (Yes, segregated tuna!) Its tuna are cleaned and processed in American Samoa, where most of the cannery workers are non-Americans from nearby independent Samoa.
Read the full opinion piece at The Wall Street Journal