IRAN - June 21 - UN Bans Sturgeon Fishing In Most Caspian.

The UN Convention on Int'l Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), meeting in Paris, bans the fishing of sturgeon from most of the Caspian Sea and its rivers as of 2002. CITES Chairman Ken Stansell says CITES would review the progress made by Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan at another meeting at end-2002 before authorising any more int'l trade in caviar and sturgeon meet. Iran is excluded because two-thirds of its catch are of a species that spends its entire life along the Iranian coast. (Iran's quota of 86 tons is larger than Russia's and Kazakhstan's combined. So the UN ban leaves Iran with a monopoly on legal caviar until the four other Caspian states prove they are stemming the massive poaching trade. In Astrakhan, a pleasant city on the Volga river, where 70% of the Caspian sturgeon mate, the reaction was a mixture of indignation, hope and relief. "It's not fair to ban fishing in Russia and Kazakhstan but not Iran", said Vladimir Ivanov, the soft-spoken director of the Caspian Fisheries Research Institute there and a prominent defender of the 300-million-year-old fish. Only two-thirds of Iran's export quota are fish bred in Iranian hatcheries, he pointed out, the rest are born in the wild or in Russian hatcheries.

He added, as quoted by IHT on June 22: "But I hope this will motivate the Caspian nations to finally sign the agreement they had prepared back in 1995". This provides for the creation of a joint force made up of law-enforcement officials from five countries to staff anti-poaching patrols in the Caspian Sea. "Well, it could have been worse", said Vyacheslav Mironov, the director of Russian Caviar, Astrakhan's oldest and largest caviar factory. CITES had embargoed the 2001 quotas of Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan - totalling 82 tons - until its meeting in Paris this week, and had threatened to ban its export if the four countries did not come up with a credible rescue plan. For every fish taken legally, 12 are taken by poachers, and most of the caviar is sold in Russia. "There is plenty of sturgeon in the Caspian", Mironov insisted. "It's just that the poachers are fishing it and not us". He is partly right, IHT noted. The sturgeon, plentiful around the world until the last century, fell victim to the testiness of its roe and of its firm, white meat and has nearly vanished from Europe and the Americas. When the Soviets built a dam in Volgograd in 1960, they eliminated the main spawning grounds of the world's last major sturgeon population. To compensate, they built a dozen hatcheries that released up to 100m fingerlings a year and banned fishing at sea. The Caspian became a giant fish farm. All of the beluga are now born in hatcheries, along with about half of the sevruga and the oscietre. The population bounced back, but in 1991, when Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan became independent and millions lost their jobs, large-scale fishing at sea took off while poaching in the Volga worsened).