17 March 2003

CAVIAR: LIVE EGG EXTRACTION, DNA TESTING, AQUACULTURE, NGO PROTEST RE BELUGA STURGEON

The Miami, Florida-based caviar importer, Marky’s Caviar, is leading the way in promoting sustainable and legal beluga caviar supplies to the U.S. market. Three novel approaches were announced by Mark Zaslavsky, president of Marky’s Caviar and the Optimus, Inc. brand of caviar. The first is the company’s intention of requiring DNA batch tests of beluga, sevruga and osetra caviar it imports. Keeping such a scientific “paper trail” from production to retail avoids the many legal pitfalls caviar importers face from dealing with a product regulated by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

The second is the company’s pledge that it would only import Caspian Sea caviar in to the United States that has been surgically extracted from females who would then be stitched back up and released back in to the sea. The process is intended to end the current practice of killing sturgeon to extract roe. Thus far limited experiments are said to produce a 95 to 100 percent survival rate, according to Mark Zaslavsky, president of Marky’s Caviar. The freed sturgeon will be tagged and studied.

The third, according to news reports, is Zaslavsky and Marky’s Caviar plan to create a beluga sturgeon aquaculture project in North Florida near Gainesville. Some 65,000 fertilized beluga eggs are in transit for distribution among Zaslavsky’s sturgeon farm effort, other aquaculture entrepreneurs and the University of Florida.

The U.S. imports 107 tons of caviar annually with 14 tons coming from beluga caviar, considered the finest (roughly 80 percent of total production). Two years ago 14 ounces of beluga caviar fetched $1000 at retail. Today that price will fetch a kilogram or 2.2 pounds. Caviar is considered the world’s most valuable wildlife resource.

Despite the fact that the CITES Secretariat believes the Asian nations bordering the Caspian Sea have a workable (and approved) international cooperative effort to conserve beluga sturgeon, U.S.-based NGOs are attempting to have imports halted. Poverty, pollution and poaching are the leading causes of sturgeon depletions in the Caspian. SeaWeb, the World Conservation Society and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) are petitioning the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to place the beluga sturgeon on the Endangered Specie Act. Repeated efforts to have the sturgeon listed on CITES Appendix I failed so the NGOs are attempting an end run by eliminating the major market for beluga caviar, a move that in essence says the NGOs know more about conserving other nation’s resources than the range nation or the entire body of nations who are members of CITES.