View Comments Mississippi farmers are losing the catfish wars against their foreign competitors with the very weapon they saw as their salvation. The domestic catfish industry, along with representatives like the late U.S. Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, lobbied to move oversight of catfish processing from the Food and Drug Administration to the U.S. Department of Agriculture five years ago with the expectation the USDA’s stricter eye would limit the foreign imports that had decimated domestic production throughout the Mississippi Delta. Instead, imports of siluriformes — the larger category of catfish and catfish-like fish sometimes referred to by their family name “pangasius” — have only increased since the switch to the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service in 2016. Meanwhile, domestic prices and production, mainly in Mississippi and other Southern states, have continued to decline.