Bill Battle peers through the window of a pickup truck at his catfish farm, Pride of the Pond, near Tunica, Miss. The land is pancake-flat, broken up by massive ponds, some holding up to 100,000 pounds of catfish.
Cormorants fly low over the ponds, keeping an eye out for whiskered, smooth-skinned fish. Battle keeps a shotgun in the front seat; business is hard enough without the birds cutting into his profit.
Battle has been catfish farming for more than three decades. Catfish has always been popular in the South, but its popularity took off throughout the country in the 1980s. Battle says they could hardly build ponds fast enough to keep up with the demand.
But he's watched with alarm over the past decade as Vietnam has flooded the U.S. market with its own, cheaper catfish, forcing him to cut back on production. "At one time, I was 3,000 acres. Now I'm basically about 1,200 acres of water," he says.
Ben Pentecost, president of the Catfish Farmers of America, says Battle is not alone — the Vietnamese imports have affected the whole domestic market. "Our industry peaked at 660 million pounds live weight fish. And this last year I think we did 300 million pounds," he says.
Vietnamese imports now make up 60 percent of the U.S. catfish market, which has helped drive more than half of the American catfish farms out of business, says Pentecost.
And U.S. catfish farmers have serious food safety concerns about the Vietnamese fish, which they say are raised with antibiotics in polluted water, Pentecost says.
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