Table of Contents Table of Contents
Previous Page  64 / 72 Next Page
Information
Show Menu
Previous Page 64 / 72 Next Page
Page Background

|

|||

|

|||

|

|||

|

|

|

||

|

|

Not enough caviar left for all

the poachers

JOURNALIST STORY

By Michel Viatteau, Agence France Presse, 5 May 2002

05

| |

||||

|

||||

|

||

|

|

|

|

|

|

||

|

|

|

|

|

|

Between low-grade poaching and large-scale mafia plundering of sturgeon,

which police are powerless to curb, illegal catches are eating up

stocks in the Volga and Caspian Sea of the fish which produce prized

black caviar.

Sergei studies and lives in Astrakhan, but his home is some 40

kilometres away from Russia’s caviar capital, in a village on one of

the countless streams in the Volga delta, which stretches over 15,000

square kilometres. “I poach to make ends meet,” he says as he pushes

his motor boat – the type the locals call “baida” – off the Volga’s

white sand. Behind his back, the great river flows peacefully, a

perfect illustration of nature’s relentless course that nothing can

change – an impression that is completely false.

“In 1990, I caught up to 10 sturgeons daily. By 1996, I could still

catch two or three every day. But last year, it took me a week to get as

much,” the young man says. Official figures confirm his observations.

According to the UN Convention of International Trade in Endangered

Species (CITES), official catches of Caspian sturgeon plummeted from

30,000 tonnes a year in the late 1970s to less than 3,000 tonnes 20

years later.

64