THE ECONOMIST june 21st, 2000
» Caviare None left for the general:
"Desperate measures to preserve the CaspianŐs dwindling sturgeon.
Did you order the poached eggs?"
GREED plus desperation times ignorance equals extinction. That is the miserable equation facing the world's most lucrative fish, the sturgeon, which used to throng the Caspian Sea and is now dying out. Trade in its eggs-caviare-is worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Poachers now use satellite technology to fix the position of their hidden nets and automatic weapons to deal with the feeble fisheries police. The haul from a single sturgeon can be worth more than a month's wage.
Catches have fallen 30-fold over the past 20 years, mainly because of overfishing. An international body that protects rare animals, CITES, which is meeting this week in Geneva, has backed away from outlawing caviare exports altogether from Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, the three big Caspian culprits. Hopes for saving the wild sturgeon now rest, precariously, on mandatory labelling, making it possible to identify the caviare's source. That should make it harder for the poachers to get their loot into respectable shops and restaurants abroad.
In theory. Faking is an established industry in Russia, as western companies know to their cost. Russian restaurateurs and their customers are not ardent conservationists. Caviare smuggling, often via Turkey and Dubai, is rampant. The new labels will probably just mean an extra obstacle for poachers. Still, better international scrutiny has dented illegal exports a bit. And that is where the real money is made: a tin of caviare that costs $100 in Moscow fetches more than ten times as much in London.
The big winners are canny western sturgeon farmers like Sandro Cancellieri. He plans to triple his caviare production to ten tonnes a year by 2005. At that rate, his eco-friendly farm in Lombardy will alone produce more than twice Azerbaijan's entire annual output.