Word: caviar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Until the early 1990s, the sturgeon supply in the Caspian Sea was tightly regulated by the Soviet Union and Iran. But when the Soviet regime collapsed, so did governmental control. Today poachers supply some 300 tons of caviar per year, 10 times as much as legal traders. The temptations are great in a region where economic opportunities are scarce. In a typical bust, smugglers in the Russian county of Astrakhan managed to load an air-force cargo plane with almost 350 kilograms of sturgeon roe before it was seized by the Federal Security Service...
...People are going to have to live without beluga caviar for a while if we are going to have any hope of rescuing the species," says Lisa Speer, senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council and a spokeswoman for a sturgeon-hugging coalition that calls itself Caviar Emptor...
...gross exaggeration on the part of the nervous media," he says. Still, the Russians have worked hard to sustain the remaining population with hatcheries and export quotas. Banning imports "would be the catalyst for a new round of poaching and illegal trade," says Armen Petrossian, head of the International Caviar Importers Association. In the U.S., the demand for beluga caviar has led not just to illegal imports of what some call black gold but also to a rash of false labeling. Arkady Panchernikov, whose Caspian Star Caviar handled some 60% of the caviar imported into the U.S., pleaded guilty...
...Caspian caviar gets harder to come by, all sorts of alternatives are popping up. Scientists can't get their hands on enough beluga sturgeon to start breeding them in the U.S. (there are fewer than five in the 50 states), but America does have its own natural population of sturgeon and sturgeonlike fish. Roe from native white sturgeon and its close cousin, the paddlefish, is becoming increasingly popular. Stolt Sea Farm, near Sacramento, California, has boosted production of its Sterling-brand caviar of farmed white sturgeon from 23 kilograms in 1995 to more than six tons a year...
...beluga ban wouldn't affect Asian restaurants and food stores: they can always buy from European suppliers. Hong Kong's House of Fine Foods, the territory's largest caviar importer, says its customers are already content with such lesser grades as osetra and sevruga caviar, which come from the same region as beluga. "We do get requests for beluga," says managing director Gephard Scherrer, "but out of the 1.5 tons we import, only about 80 kilograms is beluga." Strict controls started in 1998 have already boosted caviar prices. Tokyo had several specialty caviar restaurants before the Japanese economy deflated. Only...