After a nine-year ban, Russia has reopened exports of its exclusive sturgeon caviar to the EU.
Fearing extinction of the species, Russia stopped all exports of black caviar – the sturgeon’s eggs – in 2002, although smuggling through Turkey and the Caucasus has been an emerging growth industry since then.
The Russian Federal Fisheries Agency has now decided to resume exports to the EU of the “symbolic volume” of 150 kilos from farmed sturgeon.
“The goal is to break the ice which has formed over the past nine years when not a single permit was issued for exports of the black caviar from Russia,” its spokesman Alexander Savelyev told the AFP news agency.
He explained that aquaculture has made the future look promising again for the priced merchandise, with increased exports as an expected result. Several fish farms already operate in the Kaluga, Rostov, Astrakhan, and Novosibirsk regions.
On a realistic note, Savelyev admitted that European consumers probably would not notice much that a Russian policy change has occurred:
“An attentive European wouldn’t understand this news,” he said. “He is used to seeing cans of Russian caviar. They didn’t disappear anywhere. That was illegal import from Russia.”