The Mekong catfish that America's law says cannot be called a catfish
Basa is a catfish from the Mekong, but in American shops it cannot legally carry that word. After a trade fight in the early 2000s, Congress reserved the catfish label for one North American family. The imported fish was renamed swai or basa, and in one blind tasting it beat the local product.
Pangasius bocourti belongs to the shark-catfish family and lives mainly in fresh water in the Mekong and Chao Phraya basins of mainland Southeast Asia. It is a heavy, stout fish with a broad rounded head and a white band across its blunt snout, and it can reach 120 centimetres. It eats plants and spawns as the floods arrive, with young of about five centimetres showing up by mid-June.
The so-called catfish war began in 2002, when the United States accused Vietnam of dumping cheap, state-subsidised catfish on American shelves. In 2003, under pressure from domestic farmers, Congress barred imports from using the catfish name and added tariffs; only fish of the family Ictaluridae may be sold as true catfish. American growers called the Vietnamese product inferior, yet Mississippi State University researchers found that 58 tasters in a small blind test preferred basa by three to one.
Naming gets messy elsewhere too. British rules allow any Pangasius to be sold as river cobbler, basa or panga, and it became a supermarket staple at roughly half the price of cod. That gap tempted some fish-and-chip shops to pass it off as cod, and DNA testing led to two prosecutions in 2009 and 2010. Asian markets sometimes call it Pacific dory, and related species are occasionally mislabelled as basa.
Its farming draws criticism. Ocean Wise, linked to the Vancouver Aquarium, warns that open cages in Southeast Asia pass disease to wild basa and raise doubts about feed and farm standards, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium lists it as one to avoid. Supermarket tests in Britain found no toxic contaminants, while Australian inspectors detected traces of malachite green, probably left from treatment for white-spot disease.
Source: Basa (fish)
