Sturgeon Fishes and Caviar Dreams
by John Tidwell
A beluga sturgeon swims slowly through the murky water of the Caspian Sea, her scale-less, golden brown body bristling with bony plates reminiscent of sea monsters. She is enormous: ten feet long and 2,000 pounds. Hidden deep inside she carries a treasure, something for which people will pay thousands of dollars, risk their lives, and even murder: millions of tiny gray eggs called caviar.
It is springtime. As the massive fish noses about the sea floor for crabs, she senses a current of fresh water flowing from Russia’s Sulak River and instinctively heads toward it. For tens of millions of years, beluga sturgeon (Huso huso) have spawned in the tributaries of Central Asia’s Caspian Sea, seeking out, like salmon, the river in which they hatched. Other female sturgeons—belugas as well as stocky osetra (Acipenser gueldenstadtii) and smaller, thin-snouted sevruga (A. stellatus)—join the great female as she heads upriver, moving in massive herds toward the spawing grounds. But the old female doesn’t detect a ghostly line of nylon netting wafting in the current like grass until it catches around her head and hooks behind her gills.
In
the dark two men in a small skiff haul in their nets. Unemployed
local truck drivers, the poachers quickly bring the thrashing
female beluga close to the boat and stun her with a heavy
wooden club. They haul her ashore and open her belly, scooping
out the precious caviar while she is still alive. Other fishermen
are also collecting caviar from sturgeons they’ve captured.
Then a local businessman, who has claimed several miles of
Dagestan’s coastline as his territory, arrives with a
few large trucks. The poachers sell him the fish and the precious
roe for about $5 each and load up his trucks. In addition
to the cash, the owner protects the men from having to pay
bribes of up to two thirds of their catch to local officials
who are supposed to make sure all sturgeon catches are legal.
The owner’s trucks then take the night’s catch to a nearby camp where the fish are crudely processed. Sturgeon eggs are washed, sieved, and lightly salted—what Russians call malossol—to preserve them. Smaller illegal caviar dealers would then put the eggs into three-liter jars to be trucked to Moscow, perhaps hidden under sacks of potatoes. But this is a larger operation, so the caviar is vacuum-packed, bar-coded, and labeled in English, ready for sale in the gourmet emporiums of New York and Washington, D.C. It is then smuggled out from Astrakhan, where the bulk of Russia’s caviar business—legal and illegal—originates, or it goes south through Azerbaijan to Turkey and to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, two important gateways to Western trade.
According to TRAFFIC, the world’s largest wildlife trade monitoring program, scenarios like this fictional one have been repeated hundreds of times since the early 1990s, as the impoverished people living along the Caspian Sea legally and illegally catch the last of these giant, ancient fish. The beluga sturgeon (Huso huso) is one of the largest freshwater fish on Earth and among the oldest living vertebrates, first appearing some 250 million years ago. Beluga is one of 27 known species of sturgeon found in the Northern Hemisphere, all of which are now either threatened or endangered. In fact, experts fear that numbers of the six species of Caspian sturgeon are falling so fast that their populations could be driven to the edge of extinction. With a ravenous multimillion dollar international trade in caviar and a lawless atmosphere throughout most of the Caspian region, the situation has become so dire that governments around the world may vote to ban the international trade of Russia’s three most famous caviar sturgeons—beluga, sevruga, and osetra—bringing a multimillion dollar global industry to a halt.
Black Gold
Caviar
has been synonymous with luxury cuisine for thousands of years.
Aristotle described great platters of caviar garnished with
flowers, served amid trumpet fanfare at the end of Greek banquets.
Persians ascribed curative powers to sturgeon eggs and called
them chav-jar (“cake of power”), hence the
word caviar. England’s 12th-century King Edward
II declared sturgeon a “Royal Fish”; any sturgeon
caught in British territory had to be offered to him. For
early American colonists, sturgeon meat and caviar were the
New World’s greatest cash crop until they discovered
tobacco. Writers from Shakespeare to Dostoyevsky rhapsodized
about, and indulged in, the precious roe some call “black
gold.”
But sturgeon and their eggs have held a special, almost mystical place in the Russian soul since as long ago as the 8th century B.C., when the Scythians ruled southern Russia. Moscow’s infamous tsar Ivan the Terrible seized the Northern Caspian region from Muslim Tatars in the 16th century and began a tradition of extracting regular caviar tribute from conquered territories of the Azov, Black, and Aral seas as well. But it wasn’t until 1860 that Caspian caviar appeared in Western Europe, where its introduction as the food of the tsars made it a symbol of wealth and opulence. Caviar quickly became one of Russia’s most renowned exports. Its new cachet, however, spelled the beginning of the end of the great sturgeon schools, as caviar formed the basis of a lucrative industry in Europe and North America. Sturgeon populations everywhere were quickly overfished. What no one knew was that because sturgeon take so long to mature—from six to 25 years—wholesale netting of adult females (and their eggs) was biologically catastrophic to the fishery.
“It was more like mining than fishing,” explains Vadim Birstein, an independent Russian biologist who has been at the forefront of efforts to save Caspian sturgeon. “By 1910, sturgeon populations around the world were so depleted that they were nearly gone.”
In Russia the caviar industry had been a state monopoly since Peter the Great in the 17th century, but by the early 1900s most of the enterprise was in private hands. After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet state took control of the sturgeon fishery, centered almost entirely in the old Tatar city of Astrakhan near the northern end of the Caspian Sea. However, sturgeon catches continued to fall, partly because Stalin’s government was building hydroelectric power dams on many Russian rivers, effectively closing off 85 percent of the sturgeon’s upriver spawning grounds. Some areas of the Volga Delta, which supplies the majority of water to the Caspian Sea, actually became dry. During the 1960s, Caspian fishing remained a major industry, shared by the Soviets in the north and Iran in the southern portion of the sea. But to keep sturgeon populations going, the powerful Soviet Ministry of Fisheries had to create scores of artificial sturgeon hatcheries along the Volga, Ural, Kura, and other Caspian tributaries. There, eggs from gravid females were mixed in tanks with sperm to be fertilized. The resulting fry were then released into the Caspian to grow and mature. Tens of millions of fry have been freed each year since the late 1950s, and today many biologists believe that most of the sea’s sturgeon were spawned in hatcheries.
In the early 1970s the Soviet Ministry of Fisheries took other unilateral conservation measures: They banned trawling in the open Caspian with large, bottom-scraping nets (which destroy sturgeons’ sea-floor food sources) and restricted sturgeon fishing to spring and autumn with rigid catch limits. The Ministry of Fisheries’ tactics may have been iron-fisted, but they allowed sturgeon stocks to rebound and kept bootleg caviar to a minimum. Seven huge floating fish factories were launched in the Caspian to churn out Russian caviar and smoked sturgeon meat.
The Caviar Mafia
Everything changed when the Soviet government collapsed in 1991, and the USSR shattered into 15 pieces. Three Soviet provinces that once supplied sturgeon products suddenly became the independent nations of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan. Even territories that officially remained part of Russia, like Chechnya and Dagestan, claimed autonomy. The collapse of the Soviet regime also brought widespread unemployment and poverty to the breakaway republics. Factories closed and once plentiful resources suddenly had to be shared by an array of foreign countries.
The leaders of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan—themselves former Communist chiefs—began to behave like feudal monarchs. Prior treaties, including those governing the shared monopoly on sturgeon fishing between the USSR and Iran, were now void. The Caspian, previously the nearly exclusive sturgeon preserve of the Soviet Ministry of Fisheries, became divided among all the of nations touching the sea, each wanting to control part of the fishery. Kazakhstan, for instance, claims any sturgeon that swim by its shores. With Russian caviar selling for as much as $1,000 a pound in Western countries, today all of the littoral states are trying to catch as many sturgeon as possible.
“Under the USSR everything was centralized and controlled,” says Willem Wijinstekers, Secretary General of the UN’s Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora (CITES). “Maybe sturgeon were somewhat over-exploited, but nothing like the uncontrolled fishing we have now. It’s just chaos.”
Only Iran’s government-run Shilat fishery organization and the Russian Federation’s re-named State Committee for Fisheries, which remains nearly identical to the old Ministry, have organized fishery management programs. An estimated 90 percent of the world’s caviar comes comes from the Caspian Sea, and more than 70 percent of that is from Russia. In Astrakhan, 12 teams of federally licensed sturgeon fishermen squat in small tents called tonyas on the Volga delta, setting their nets each day exactly as they did during Soviet times. They are monitored by the Fish Guards, special squads of local police working for the Committee for Fisheries, with the power to arrest or make commando raids on regional poaching gangs, who are known as “The Caviar Mafia.” But by the mid-1990s it had become clear that the Fish Guard were no match for organized crime.
“The Mafia have got boats that are five times faster than the government inspector’s boats,” explains Wijinstekers. “They’ve got bigger guns than the inspectors have ever seen in their lives, so they don’t dare to stop a boat. And if inspectors do catch them, the poachers just pay them off.”
In 1993, then Russian president Boris Yeltsin assigned military troops from several different government agencies to protect not only the Fish Guards, but also federal sturgeon hatcheries and fishing grounds. However, in Russia, having more militia around doesn’t necessarily help.
“There are six different military structures supposedly guarding the official fishing in the Volga River,” Birstein says. “Border guards, local police, local militia all standing around with Kalashnikovs while these guys fish. But they are really like six different gangs. When the fisherman catches a fish, guess who he has to give it to? The guys with the guns.”
With cash scarce, ordinary villagers in the former Soviet Republics are left to fend for themselves. Many turn to the Caspian for food and trade, doing what they have done for centuries: surviving. Chronically underpaid Fish Guards and local militia also turn to bribes and smuggling to make ends meet.
But according to TRAFFIC and the Russian press there is an even greater incentive to work for the Caviar Mafia. Everyone is in it: the police, the local government, the military, even the agency that controls all sturgeon fishing, caviar production, and sturgeon exports: the Russian Federation State Committee for Fisheries. In 1997, Russian border guards representing the committee halted the merchant ship Camilia, which was carrying a huge load of sturgeon up the river Sulak in Dagestan. When the border guards started unloading the fish into trucks, the Dagestani Water Police arrived and, with Kalashnikovs cocked, ordered the fish to be put back on the boat. A month later several bombs went off in the Russian apartment complex where border guards and their families lived, killing 67 people—a suspected act of revenge by the Dagestan Caviar Mafia.
Giant trawling ships with great bottom-sweeping nets have returned to the open Caspian Sea for the first time since the USSR banned them in 1959. Last year, TRAFFIC reported that many of Dagestan’s trawlers are owned either by the Republic’s Attorney General, the Minister of Internal Affairs, or the head of the Water Police, thereby remaining unchallenged on the Caspian’s dark waters. During the 1990s the Russian government reported the arrest of thousands of poachers, who were fined and imprisoned for years. However, a TRAFFIC report stated that while the amount of illegal caviar seized has steadily increased since 1992, the number of poachers arrested has remained exactly the same—an indication, the report says, that most poachers behind bars are poor fishermen who failed to pay protection money.
Twilight of a Legend
While looming threats from pollution, oil, and “killer” jellyfish are making it hard for sturgeon populations in the Caspian Sea [see “Caspian Calamities”], the effect of more than ten years of unrestricted fishing has been devastating. In 1978 it was estimated that there were 142 million adult sturgeon in the Caspian. The estimate for 2001 is fewer than 300,000. As a result, in 1998 CITES placed Caspian sturgeon species on its Appendix II list, requiring that any international trade in these species have official CITES permits, which are supposed to guarantee that the fish were caught legally and that their harvest wouldn’t damage wild populations.
Still, Caspian sturgeon numbers continued to fall precipitously, and in May 2000 Vladimir Izmailov, the deputy head of the Russian State Committee for Fisheries, announced that that year’s harvest of sturgeon was so small that it would fall far short of the catch quota of 560 tons set by CITES. Legal Russian caviar exports had dropped to 40 tons in 2000, less than half the amount of the year before. There weren’t even enough adult sturgeon to supply fertilized eggs to hatcheries. Iran’s Shilat, which still uses many of the same fishery management techniques that the Soviets had, reduced its exports from 90 to 70 tons in order to “conserve sturgeon.” The illegal catch for the region remains an estimated ten times the official one. But given the mafia-style activities of government officials in the region, Birstein argues that there is no real “legal” catch. Says Birstein, “So how can you trust their official figures? You are asking the cat to guard the cream.”
The man who ostensibly has ultimate power over these committees in Russia, President Vladimir Putin, has shown himself to be no friend of conservation. In late May last year, Putin abolished the Russian State Committee on the Environment and the Russian Forest Service. He placed their responsibilities in the care of the Ministry of Natural Resources, the government agency that, among other things, oversees land development, logging, and mining. Experts say this was an act of economic triage, which it may indeed be, but in one swipe of his pen Putin eliminated all regulatory oversight of the Committee for Fisheries, a committee that he has told to raise its own funds. Certainly, Western conservationists say, Russians must realize that by systematically destroying their natural environment they will ultimately destroy not only their sources of income, but their food and water as well.
“There is no tomorrow in Russia,” says Mats Engstrom, an American caviar distributor who has done business with the Russians for decades. “All the Russian entrepreneurs I know never invest in their own country. So the money that goes to export is not going to come back to Russia at all. Russians don’t plan for the future because tomorrow the government may change the rules or put you in jail. That’s the mentality.”
Buffalo of the Water
It all began with a label that started to peel away from its jar. This caught the attention of U.S. customs agents at John F. Kennedy Airport who knew that legitimate caviar labels always stay stuck. But what appeared to be a routine import of Caspian caviar for a well-known American trading company launched an international investigation by federal officials that exposed a caviar smuggling ring of beluga-sized proportions.
“We called it an octopus because every arm of the company was some type of illegal activity,” recalls U.S. Fish & Wildlife special agent Sal Amato, who led the probe. “It was by far the most dramatic experience with caviar smuggling that I have ever encountered.”
Starting in 1995, two Iranian-Americans, Hossein Lolavar and his brother-in-law Ken Noroozi, began importing large amounts of poached Russian caviar to their Rockville, Maryland-based company, U.S. Caviar & Caviar. During the course of its investigation, the U.S. government found that Lolavar had imported nearly 20 tons of caviar each year, for unsuspecting clients including American Airlines and gourmet grocery stores like Fresh Fields and Sutton Place Gourmet. Even when CITES began requiring permits for international trade in sturgeon products in 1998, the flow of now illegal caviar continued. According to U.S. Department of Justice reports, the caviar was smuggled into Dubai by Al-Raquiat, a local trading company, which then bribed Dubai CITES officials with prostitutes to get the necessary permits. Noroozi’s Dubai-based Company, Kenfood, then bought both the permits and the caviar from Al-Raquiat and exported them to Maryland.
Back in Rockville, Lolavar was also committing fraud by mixing the roe of endangered Tennessee paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) with real Russian caviar and selling it to clients as authentic sevruga. Lolavar even went so far as to create fake certificates and seals from a fictitious Russian supplier to provide authenticity. The scheme worked until customs agents at Kennedy Airport sent samples of Lolavar’s “sevruga” to the National Fish & Wildlife Forensics Lab in Ashland, Oregon, where the true source of the caviar was identified. During the investigation, agents seized nearly $3 million in illegal caviar from the company and found that, in the 1998-99 season alone, Lolavar had smuggled more Caspian caviar than the entire year’s legal quota for Russia. Noroozi and Lolavar went to jail and were fined $10.4 million, the largest penalty ever assessed for a wildlife crime.
For Amato, this case reveals the scope of caviar smuggling today. Estimated at $125 million, this illegal trade ranks second only to illicit drugs in scale and profits. “We’ve already seen that people will go to the same lengths to sell caviar that they do to sell illegal drugs,” Amato says. “We’ve seen couriers paid just like drug couriers, we’ve seen shipments with false-bottoms just like what you see in narcotics. And I’m talking tons and tons—not pounds.”
Cases like U.S. Caviar & Caviar helped bring representatives of the 152 CITES member nations together in a meeting last December in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. At issue was whether to ban the international trade of some of the most coveted species of sturgeons, including beluga, osetra, and sevruga. A final decision is not expected until this June, but the dire situation of Caspian sturgeon species has made a ban on Caspian caviar a real possibility. The Russian Committee for Fisheries has even hinted at an official sturgeon fishing moratorium of its own next year, although experts believe it would not stop the poaching entirely.
Opinions on whether a trade ban would help save Caspian Sea sturgeon seem to break cleanly between conservationists and supporters of the legal caviar trade. Conservationists say a ban would send a strong message to nations like Russia and Iran to straighten up and manage their fisheries properly. Caviar traders retort that such a move would be disastrous for the teetering economies of the Caspian nations and halt all conservation efforts there.
“Who will pay for sturgeon hatcheries if there is no trade allowed?” asks Armen Petrossian, president of Petrossian Paris, one of Europe’s largest caviar traders. “The only source of sturgeon conservation is from export of caviar and meat. If there is no export there will be no sturgeon.” (In fact, many international conservation programs for the Caspian Sea are already in the works, including a $20 million pledge from the World Bank to help Azerbaijan build hatcheries and clean its coastline.)
Some also fear that a ban on legal trade will only drive the caviar market underground and fuel even greater illegal activity. Ronald Orenstein, president of Canada’s International Wildlife Coalition, disagrees, and likens the caviar trade to an earlier illicit trade: ivory.
“With ivory the the commodity wasn’t ivory—it was legal ivory,” he says. “In that case the only way the illegal market could thrive was because it was piggy-backed on the legal trade, and smugglers could disguise it as legal. But as it turns out there wasn’t a big market for hot ivory, so with the cloak of legality removed from it, the illegal ivory market collapsed.”
However, because CITES governs only international trade, a ban would have no effect on, for example, Russia’s domestic caviar demand—which seems to be insatiable. There, Ornstein asserts the sturgeon market is doomed because dealers will simply run out of sturgeon. Russia’s native conservation organizations, which are numerous and dedicated, nevertheless are powerless (and penniless) to stop what appears to be an inexorable march toward the commercial extinction of Caspian sturgeon species.
In
the southern Caspian Sea, Iranian sturgeon hatcheries—the
conservation poster-children of the region—diligently
toil away producing and releasing as many fry as they can.
Manfred Wirth of Berlin’s Institute of Freshwater Ecology
and Inland Fisheries says most experts agree you need to release
at least 150 million baby sturgeon each year to maintain the
fishery. So far, Iran has produced only about 50 million per
year, and the other littoral states even fewer. But Birstein
points out that there have never been any scientific data
on how many of these babies actually survive to adulthood,
raising the question of whether these official releases are
more political gestures than effective aquaculture.
But all is not completely lost. Even if the Caspian fishery collapses and all the smugglers pack their nets for greener pastures, remnant beluga and other sturgeon populations may still survive here and there. Small numbers are also being raised on a handful of tiny fish farms in places like Hawaii, Canada, and Florida. Even Birstein holds out hope that Caspian sturgeon will not go the way of the dinosaurs just yet.
“These fish have survived for 250 million years,” Birstein says. “They have lived through a lot of disasters, and I think they will survive this one too—barely.”
more! Caspian Calamaties and Fish Food
—John Tidwell, a freelance writer and independent television producer, last wrote about poisonous pitohuis in the March/April 2001 issue of ZooGoer.
ZooGoer 30(3) 2001. Copyright 2001 Friends of the National Zoo. All rights reserved.
