INDIANOLA, Miss. -- America's catfish industry, stung by dropping prices triggered by a flood of cheaper fish from Vietnam, is gearing up for a possible antidumping campaign.

The effort led by Indianola-based Catfish Farmers of America is coupled with a plan to hire inspectors to assist federal regulatory agencies in enforcing a new catfish labeling law.

Congress in November barred importers, restaurants and grocery stores from labeling fish from Vietnam as catfish.

Hugh Warren, executive vice president of the association, said the Vietnamese fish, which resemble the American catfish, have captured as much as 20 percent of the frozen catfish filet market.

Warren describes the imported product as a cheaply produced, low-quality fish that isn't even in the same family as U.S. farm-raised catfish.

"While their volume is going straight up, their price is going straight down," Warren said of the imports.

The catfish association has hired a Washington law firm to begin preparing a possible antidumping petition to be filed later this year with the Department of Commerce and International Trade Commission.

Protecting a domestic industry that had revenue of more than $590 million last year is vital to the South. The greatest concentration of catfish farms are in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana. There are more than 190,000 acres of catfish ponds in the United States, with 110,000 of those acres in Mississippi.

58 cents a pound

The average price processors pay farmers for catfish has fallen over the past two years. It was 74 cents per pound in January 2000.

"I know of processing plants paying 58 cents a pound now," Warren said. "That's below the cost of production, which varies from operation to operation. It is anywhere from 65 to 70 cents a pound for break-even cost."

George Hastings, president of AquaPro, a publicly traded catfish farming operation with 2,600 acres of ponds in the Mississippi Delta, said the imports have created major financial problems for growers and many could be forced out of business.

"The Vietnamese fish jumped from a production that was about 200,000 pounds in a month to a number between 1.5 million and 2 million in a month," Hastings said.

He said the full impact hit American growers last spring after they had already stocked their ponds for the current growing season.