By Marina Kozlova

TASHKENT, April 24 (IPS/AWW) – Happy days are here again for caviar lovers worldwide as the export ban meant to protect the sustainability of this prized delicacy has been lifted recently. But environmentalists are not optimistic, saying that the ban and its subsequent lifting did not really make a dent in the illegal harvesting and sale of caviar.  

“The ban and its lifting have no real effect on the illegal fishing and marketing of the Caspian caviar (because) the black market of caviar has its own rules,” Bahman Aghai Diba, a consultant on international law for the World Resources Company in McLean, Virginia in the United States, told Asia Water Wire.

He noted that despite the ban, the illegal caviar trade is flourishing. He added that illegal and unregulated fishing in the Caspian Sea has reduced the sturgeon stocks by more than 80 percent.

According to Diba, one of the reasons for this decline is due to illegal fishing activities conducted by impoverished fishermen living along the Caspian’s coastal states. “They have no respect for the preservation of the endangered species as long as nobody is concerned about their own survival. Why should they care about those laws if they have hungry families to feed?” he said.

Environmental experts agree that there is an urgent need to address illegal trade of caviar and sturgeon meat products.

 “Between 1998 and 2004, the European Union imported altogether 591 tonnes of caviar – 90 percent of which (were imported) from the Caspian. But the problem is not legal trade. The problem is illegal trade that is too high. It is decreasing sturgeon stocks,” explained Volker Homes, a Frankfurt-based expert on species conservation who also works for Traffic.

Large seizures of illegal caviar in Europe indicate that there is a “thriving” caviar black market and “caviar smugglers are well-organised and use sophisticated methods and the illegal caviar trade is considered to have strong links with organised crime groups.”

While legal international trade in caviar between 1998 and 2004 reached 1,307 tonnes, almost 12 tonnes of caviar were seized by European authorities between 2000 and 2005, Traffic reported in its leaflet, “Black Gold: The Caviar Trade in Western Europe”.

According to the report, authorities are finding it hard to “quantify the levels of illegal caviar trade, as this is by nature a hidden activity”, citing anecdotal, seizure reports and convictions as sources for information about the black market. It is not known how much illegal caviar and meat trade has flourished during the ban.
 
The report concludes that the extent of illegal trade is “considerably higher given that much of it is undetected and information is incomplete for some importing countries”.

Most of the world’s caviar comes from the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water straddling Europe and Asia. It is estimated that legal caviar trade worldwide amounts to 100 million U.S. dollars per year. But industrial and agricultural pollution, as well as rampant poaching, have caused the rapid decline in the population of sturgeon, prized for its meat and its roe, which end up in expensive restaurants as caviar.

“(Poaching) is one of the most (common) difficulties for the sturgeon,” said Homes. Traffic is the wildlife trade monitoring network of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the World Conservation Union.

In January 2006, the Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) banned nine countries from exporting caviar and sturgeon meat after they failed to substantiate their claim that their respective wild sturgeon stocks are sustainable. Among these are Caspian basin states Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan.

Iran, which was able to support its claim for sustainable sturgeon stock, was exempted from the ban and allowed to export 44,370 kilogrammes of caviar and up to 100,000 kilogrammes of meat from the Persian sturgeon.

When the ban was lifted in January this year, CITES finally published the export quotas for 2007 for sturgeon caviar and meat sourced from the five Caspian basin states, including Iran. The countries will be allowed to export up to 85,967 kilogrammes of caviar and 248,555 kilogrammes of sturgeon meat. Caviar and meat from farmed sturgeon were not affected by the export quotas ruling.

According to a CITES report, the biggest caviar importers between 1998 and 2004 are the US and Switzerland with 83 percent, while France and Germany top the European Union member states in caviar importation.

The CITES Secretariat has not published export quotas for beluga, the world’s most valuable caviar, because the information provided by the five states “is not yet complete,” the Secretariat said in a press release. Beluga caviar fetches anywhere from 250 dollars to more than 5,000 dollars per kilo in the international market.

Other popular caviar are those from the Russian, Persian and Stellate sturgeons. According to a report by WWF, 27,630 kilogrammes of the Russian variety, 38,000 kilogrammes of Persian sturgeon, and 20,337 kilogrammes of Stellate sturgeon are the allowed amounts for export from the region.

Since CITES became operational in 1975, all parties ratifying it have been obliged to introduce their own national laws to penalise the illegal trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora. But wildlife crime, which covers poaching, capture/collection from the wild, smuggling, possession and illegal import or export of endangered species of wild fauna and flora, is a relatively new crime area for law enforcement agencies worldwide.

The United Nations Environment Programme said in October 2004 that many countries lack the ability to fight wildlife crimes. National authorities often lack the necessary resources and experience to meet the challenge, and there is not enough coordination and information sharing among various enforcement authorities.

In November 2001, the CITES Secretariat announced that much of the caviar worth 25 million dollars that left the United Arab Emirates during the first 10 months of that year “appeared to be of unlawful origin”.

 “On the other side, the coastal states think the Caspian Sea is (a piece of) property without an owner and whoever gets more out of it, legally or illegally is the winner. The Caspian caviar is going to continue its downward trend due to natural and unnatural reasons,” Diba continued, citing pollution and overfishing as two major reasons for the depleted fish stock.

Alexander Jilkin, Russia’s Astrakhan region governor, was quoted at his site www. jilkin.ru as saying that last year’s ban urged the region to conserve sturgeon stocks. Considered a viable stock, the first lot of farmed beluga sturgeon, which weighs two kilogrammes each, will be released in the Caspian Sea this year.

“The ban was not conceived to be permanent. International sales can give fishers a stake in the survival of the sturgeon and bring in money needed for conservation programmes,” Michael Williams, programme officer from the Division of Environmental Law and Conventions of the United Nations Environment Programme, told AWW.

“The intention is to promote legal sales over illegal ones, the ban only affects legal sales that rely on the permit system and not illegal sales that bypass CITES,” Williams said.

Meanwhile, sturgeons are dying in the Caspian in large quantities. Apart from illegal fishing and trade, toxic substances invading the food chain are also depleting stocks.

Wastes from Russia's industrial facilities carried down the Volga River gravely pollute the Caspian Sea. The exploration and exploitation of oil fields are also major polluters. The region's oil reserves are estimated at more than 200 billion barrels, which puts it in second place after the Middle East.

Oil pollution levels in different parts of the Caspian are between 1.5 times and 11.8 times the maximum permissible concentration, Alexander Bolshov, a consultant for the Atyrau branch office of the Kazakh agency for applied ecology, told this reporter in 2004.
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Copper in the northern Caspian exceeds the maximum permissible level by 3.9 times. The zinc concentration, at a short distance away from the Cheleken Peninsula in Turkmenistan, exceeds the MPC by 7.2 times, he said.

Although copper and zinc are used as nutritional supplements, they are heavy metals that can damage living creatures at certain concentrations and tend to accumulate in the food chain. On the top of the food chain are human beings who eat sturgeon caviar and meat.
(END/MK/LC/250407)