Conservationists yesterday hailed a Russian proposal to ban sturgeon fishing in the Caspian Sea for five years as a vital step towards preventing the fish from being hunted to extinction by caviar traders.
Caviar from beluga sturgeon
The unexpected announcement could help reverse an almost irretrievable collapse in the world's population of sturgeon, 90 per cent of which live in the Caspian Sea.
Russia, which exercises tremendous influence in the Caspian basin, said it would urge Azerbaijan, Iran and Kazakhstan, the other three countries that border the inland sea, to agree to the moratorium.
"We are ready to renounce sturgeon fishing, even for research purposes," Andrei Krainy, head of the Russian State Fisheries, told a press conference. "The loss to our neighbours' budgets will not be large and we will gain much more."
The move comes after international efforts ease the sturgeon's plight stalled. In 2006, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) imposed a ban on the caviar trade but reintroduced quotas the following year after coming under pressure from Caspian nations.
The world's sturgeon population has shrunk by 90 per cent in the past two decades as a result of pollution, over-fishing and growing demand for luxury products. A trawl survey in the Russia's Caspian waters showed that sturgeon stocks had dwindled by 45 per cent between 2004 and 2005 alone.
"It's excellent that the problem is being seriously acknowledged and if the other nations agreed to this, it could be a real step in the right direction," said Julia Roberson, programme manager of Caviar Emptor, a sturgeon advocacy group.
Russia's calls to ban fishing for research purposes - a loophole that has been exploited for commercial purposes - was particularly encouraging, conservationists said.
While Russia has maintained a ban on the international export of black caviar, the roe produced by the female sturgeon, since 2005, marine biologists warned that the country needed to do more to stamp out poaching - which is often conducted in cahoots with government agencies - in the region.
"Poachers take more than legal fishermen," said Phaedra Doukakis, a specialist on the sturgeon trade at the Pew Institute for Ocean Science. "The challenge for Russia is the vastness of the Volga River Delta.It won't just take this moratorium, it will also take a pretty good crackdown on illegal fishing."
Even a five-year ban, however, is unlikely to allow sturgeon populations to recover. One of the world's most long-lived fish, the sturgeon does not begin to lay its eggs until it is 15 years old, and scientists estimate that a ban on fishing would need to last four decades to be effective.
