Global Policy Forum

By Seth Mydans

This time, the Vietnamese have invaded the United States, with catfish, and a bitter war has broken out for access to America's frying pans. The battlefield is the free market, new terrain for Vietnam, which gave in to American pressure last year and signed a trade agreement that knocks down trade barriers in return for access to American markets.

No sooner was the agreement signed than the Catfish Farmers of America, an industry group, gave the Vietnamese a quick lesson in the rough world of the free market. Their message: competitors will do what it takes to make a profit, even if that means throwing those trade barriers back up.

Vietnam does not have a great deal to sell to the United States, but seafood products are near the top of the list, and they have done well. Inexpensive Vietnamese catfish imports have soared, from 575,000 pounds four years ago to 20 million pounds now, capturing as much as 20 percent of America's frozen catfish fillet market. More and more of the fish, grown in gigantic river pens in the Mekong Delta, are finding themselves on American barbecues, supplanting home-grown catfish raised in the Mississippi Delta.

The American fishermen have fought back, contending that the Vietnamese fish are not really catfish and persuading Congress to bar the Vietnamese from using that name. The American group is also pressing hard for import duties based on anti-dumping laws. They have begun a hardball publicity campaign aimed at buyers, calling Vietnamese catfish dirty, even toxic, and definitely un-American.

The encounter seems to have stunned Vietnam, where as many as 400,000 catfish farmers work in an industry that sends about one-third of its $1.8 billion in exports to the United States. Vietnamese government statements have condemned the moves as "an unfair protectionist act," a violation of the new trade pact and even "a new war, not to fight Communism but to combat Vietnamese catfish."

Apart from the cries of outrage, the Vietnamese are watching and learning. "We regard these problems as first-hand experience in negotiation, doing business with American partners and understanding United States law," said Le Phuoc Hai, a Vietnamese trade official.

In Washington, Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who was once a prisoner of war in Vietnam and who later pressed Vietnam to open its markets, sounded shamefaced. He called the catfish war "a troubling example of the very protectionism we have urged the Vietnamese to abandon."

The victims of a cut in American imports would be fishermen like Nguyen Van Dam, 42, who grew up on his father's floating catfish farm and now produces thousands of tons of fish a year, mostly for sale overseas. In their gigantic underwater pen in Chau Doc in the Mekong Delta, thousands of catfish thrash to the surface as Mr. Dam tosses in their daily feed. His production costs are lower than those of American fishermen, he said, because Vietnamese labor is cheaper and because the flowing water of the river washes the fish.

The first attack by American catfish farmers was semantic. They argued that only the North American species — known as Ictaluridae — are genuine catfish, though indeed there are more than 2,000 species of catfish. Congress took their point and barred the Vietnamese from using the word catfish even though their imports look and taste the same. It then enacted another law requiring meat and seafood products to be labeled with their country of origin.

That offered some good debating points for American catfish producers. "They've grown up flapping around in third world rivers and dining on whatever they can get their fins on," reads one advertisement issued by the catfish lobby.

Representative Marion Berry, an Arkansas Democrat whose state is one of the three leading producers of catfish, offered the novel idea that Vietnamese fish are contaminated by the defoliant Agent Orange, which was sprayed by the United States during the war. "That stuff doesn't break down," he said.

The next step in the campaign against the imports is to persuade Congress that Vietnam is "dumping" its catfish in the American market at artificially low prices. A delegation from the Department of Commerce visited here last month to investigate the claim and is to issue a preliminary decision in December on whether to impose anti-dumping duties. The department is not scheduled to make its final ruling until February.

In the meantime, the Vietnamese seem to be learning to play the game. Government officials met with the Commerce Department delegation last month and argued that their fish were "absolutely not dumped in the United States market or in any other market in the world," said Phan Thuy Thanh, a government spokeswoman.

Nguyen Thi Hong Minh, Vietnam's deputy minister for fisheries, joined the verbal combat with gusto. The labeling law is itself un-American, she said. It is intended "to protect the interests of a relatively small group of wealthy catfish industrialists at the expense of the free trade spirit and the best interests of the United States consumer."

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