On Tuesday the United Nations lifted a year-old embargo on exports of most types of caviar from the Caspian Sea, which is the main source of the delicacy, regardless of the fact that Sturgeon stocks are continuing to decline.
Caviar exports, with the value of as much as US$9,500 a kilo, were banned in 2006 because the main producers; Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan, failed to meet requirements, such as providing stock levels. The U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) said it authorised the sale of nearly 96 tonnes of caviar in 2007, some 15 percent below the quotas handed out in 2005.
CITES said that the five producer states had agreed between themselves to cut the combined catch quotas for sturgeon by 20 percent from 2005 levels, with some species seeing a fall of over 30 percent.
According to CITES Secretary-General Willem Wijnstekers it will take decades of careful fisheries management to ensure that Sturgeon stocks recover to safer levels. He believes that the decision taken by CITES last year not to publish caviar quotas has helped stimulating improvements to monitoring programmes and scientific assessments.
Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing (IUU) is a large problem in sturgeon fisheries, as in most other commercial fisheries throughout the world. Industry officials put the illegal trade at around 100 tonnes a year, roughly the same as the legal market.
A decision on whether to lift a ban on beluga, the most expensive caviar, was postponed for a further month to give producers more time to provide the needed information on stocks and other issues.
It is estimated that caviar stocks decreased over 90 percent in 20 years due to over-fishing. CITES has been regulating trade since 2001.
Around 90 percent of the world’s caviar comes from the Caspian Sea. Exports from other areas, such as the Black Sea and Danube River fisheries and the Heilongjiang/Amur River on the Sino-Russian border remained banned either at the producers’ request or because states have not yet provided the needed information.
On the consumer side, 95% of the caviar goes to just the European Union, Japan, Swizerland and the USA.