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many of these little farms have the family outhouse just feed directly into
the ponds."
If that makes you less interested in ordering the tilapia, then you
surely don’t want any Vietnamese “catfish” either. U.S. aquaculture
produces channel catfish, but these days, American producers compete
with a flood of cheap Vietnamese fish that are marketed as catfish. Dr.
Carole Engle, chair and director of aquaculture and fisheries at the
University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, says these Vietnamese catfish are
“not only a different species, it's a different genus and a different family.
We call it pangasius.”
To understand pangasius farming in Vietnam, one must first know a
little bit about life in the Mekong Delta. Engle explains, “What's striking
when you first get there is that there's more water than there is land in the
Mekong Delta region. There are these large rivers coming through the
Mekong Delta… These waters are everything. A lot of the transportation is
on the water, and a lot of people live on the water, on houseboats. It's also
a disposal system. People live on these rivers and their restrooms are right
on these boats and they are discharging right on the rivers. And all the
human waste, and all of the waste from cities… it's all going into the river
and the river is the source of the water.”
That water is where the fish are raised. “A lot of the fish are raised in
cages directly in rivers,” says Engle, but “more and more the pangasius are
raised in what the Vietnamese call ponds.” But the ponds are nothing like
U.S. aquaculture ponds that are closed systems using clean water. The
Vietnamese ponds are regularly flushed with polluted river water.
"Upstream a factory or a houseboat might have discharged something into
it, and all that human waste is flowing through these ponds because they
are flushing it through a few times a day," Engle explains.
Another concern with imported farm-raised seafood is the use of
drugs and pesticides that are banned in the United States. A few that show
up frequently include the drugs chloramphenicol and nitrofurans, and the
fungicide malachite green. Each of these is banned in the United States for
a good reason. Chloramphenicol can cause aplastic anemia, a condition in
which the bone marrow does not produce enough new blood cells, in