Word: caviar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Better get your last licks in soon, however. The beluga sturgeon that produce the world's best caviar are under enormous pressure from overfishing, dam building and pollution by the former Soviet republics that ring the Caspian Sea. Most species of sturgeon are in decline--some as much as 90%--and those native to the Caspian appear to be doomed. Environmental groups have petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to put beluga on the endangered-species list--a move that would cut off supply to the U.S., the world's largest consumer (Americans swallow up to 80% of the annual...
...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...
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. The black market for caviar exploded. Today poachers supply 10 times as much caviar as legal traders--some 300 tons per year. The temptations are great in a region where economic opportunities are scarce. A single suitcase filled with caviar, exported via courier, can net more than $100,000. In a typical bust, smugglers in Astrakhan managed to load a Russian air force cargo plane with 770 lbs. of sturgeon...
...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. Tariffs collected from the legal trade pay for the hatcheries that produce 97% of beluga swimming in the Caspian. Without revenues from the legal trade, says Petrossian, there would be no incentive to maintain the hatcheries or to police poachers...
...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 last month to six counts of fraud and trafficking without permits for falsely labeling inferior grades of caviar as beluga. "Most of the caviar in the country has been brought in illegally," says Edward Grace, the Wildlife Service special agent who investigated the case...