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Not enough caviar left for all
the poachers
JOURNALIST STORY
By Michel Viatteau, Agence France Presse, 5 May 2002
05
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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.
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