Caviar crisis

Many of us, not being regular purchasers of the sturgeon’s eggs, will be unaware of the gravity of the caviar crisis. I have only just learnt that the population of the beluga sturgeon, which produces the best-quality caviar and lives mostly in the Caspian Sea, has suffered a 90 per cent decline in the past 20 years. It would seem that the fishing in this sea was much better regulated in the days of communism in the Soviet Union and the Shah’s regime in Iran. But the independent, not to say irresponsible, Russians, Azerbaijanis, Kazakhs and Turkmen, and the fundamentalist Iranians, without any joint agreement to protect this hugely valuable resource, have so ruthlessly overfished the Caspian (often by poaching in each other’s waters) that the beluga sturgeon has now been hunted almost to extinction.

Something like 70 per cent of the exported beluga caviar goes to the United States. Its Natural Resources Defense Council has been trying for several years to get the fish listed as an endangered species, but it is only within the past two months that the import of beluga caviar into America from the Caspian and Black Seas has been banned.