When Eggs Are Poached

The sturgeon, whose caviar can fetch $1,200 a kilo, is now deemed a threatened species by the World Wildlife Fund. Owen Matthews reports from the mouth of the Volga River on the police, the poachers and their prey.


Senior Lieutenant Alexei Chepinov of the fisheries police balances on the pitching bow of a police launch and strains to haul a sturgeon poacher's trot line up from the depths of the fast-flowing waters of the Volga River. A long rope hung with dozens of sharp hooks breaks the surface -- and on it is a struggling, 4-foot sturgeon, a trickle of black caviar oozing out of its belly where a hook has torn its flesh. From the bank, a small group of poachers watch with binoculars as Chepinov hauls in and cuts a dozen illegal lines and impounds four fish. The kilogram of caviar in the belly of each of the Sevruga sturgeons are worth $40 wholesale on the Volga Delta -- and up to $1,200 in the luxury delicatessens of London and Paris. The poachers have lost nearly $160 -- a couple of month's wages for anyone lucky enough to have a job on the impoverished Volga delta.


The arithmetic is deadly for the fish. The great Caspian caviar fishery, formerly controlled and protected by the Soviet Union, has degenerated into a dangerous free-for-all that threatens the sturgeon with extinction. On the Volga in Russia, on the Ural River in Kazakhstan and -- most devastatingly -- on the open Caspian Sea, caviar poachers are butchering a species, and also a business, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.


"In Soviet times, caviar was a monopoly, and the state dictated quotas, prices and terms, and punished poachers severely," laments Konstantin Leontyev, the director of Russkaya Ikra, the largest caviar processing plant in the Volga delta city of Astrakhan. "Now all the republics bordering the Caspian are independent, the caviar companies are private, there is no state control, no monopoly and no fish."


Experts estimate that so many sturgeon are being poached out of the Volga and the Caspian Sea that next year could be the last caviar production season for many years. Sturgeon take nine to 15 years to reach maturity, depending on the type, and the stocks of adult fish have dwindled to almost nothing. Catches have fallen by more than 90 percent in the last decade, to just over 160 tons of caviar per year, and the fabled Giant Beluga sturgeon has all but disappeared.


The last recorded full-grown, 60-year -old Beluga was caught in 1989 and weighed in at 988 kilos, including 120 kilos of caviar. It now sits, stuffed and forlorn, in the natural history museum in Astrakhan, a testament to a bygone age.


Nearly as glum is Russkaya Ikra's Leontyev, most of whose production lines stand idle. Ten years ago, his factory processed 1,300 tons of caviar, mostly for export, earning the Soviet government more than $350 million in hard currency. This year, Leontyev says he'll be lucky to produce 75 tons. Most of the production lines at the factory have already been converted to processing "common" fish such as herring, carp and pike, and Leontyev is preparing to lay off workers.


The authorities are fighting a losing battle. Two large fish-breeding farms in the Volga delta, funded by the federal government, release 50 million baby sturgeon into the river every year. Under normal circumstances, about 1 percent would make it to adulthood and breed. With current levels of poaching, even immature fish are being caught and sold for their meat instead of being thrown back to grow to full size. The effect is that the number of mature, caviar-producing fish is dwindling to a dangerously low level.


Russia still sets an official quota for sturgeon caught in rivers and attempts to enforce a 1970 ban on sturgeon fishing in the Caspian Sea itself. This year's quota is 1,600 tons of sturgeon, down from more than 10,000 tons in 1988. However, the World Wildlife Fund -- which put sturgeon on its list of threatened species last year -- estimates that for every ton of fish caught legally, up to six tons are poached. Most of that is pulled from the open sea in undiscriminating trawl nets, which kill young fish before they've had a chance to reproduce. Only Iran, which controls 450 miles of the southern shoreline of the Caspian, has managed to keep poaching under control, sticking to its 1,000-ton quota by maintaining a Soviet-style monopoly and punishing poaching with five years in prison.


For the licensed caviar fishermen at Ikryanovo (Caviartown) outside Astrakhan, the quota system is little more than an annoying formality. A bored-looking policeman watches as the fishermen drop a giant dragnet into the river from a launch and then haul it in with a clunky winch, wading into the water to drag out the struggling sturgeon before the rest of the fish are scooped out of the net.


Officially, each sturgeon is weighed and entered as part of the official quota allocated to the collective farm that runs the Ikryanovo fishery. In practice, there are so few sturgeon that they keep all they can get, young and old alike.


"Ten years ago, we would get 50 or 100 sturgeon each time we cast the net," said Vasily, the fishermen's shift boss. "Now we're lucky if we get one or two. And everyone is on our back -- the local police, the fisheries inspectors, the fisheries police -- all checking that we haven't exceeded our quota, even though I doubt we'll even make our 20-ton allocation this season. It's easier [for the police] to hassle us than to go out and catch some real poachers."


As well as the forlorn policeman at Ikryanovo, there was a party of wealthy-looking, well-built men and their expensively dressed wives having a picnic in the garden of a nearby house. Kostya, a man with gold teeth and a Rolex watch, introduced himself jokingly as "the local prosecutor's chief assistant," before taking Vasily, the shift boss, aside for a "little chat."


"The local krutiye (mafia)," whispered one fisherman. By the time Kostya and his friends had left, the four sturgeon Vasily had caught during our visit had mysteriously disappeared into the trunk of their Mercedes.


Clearly, enforcing the quota system is a logistical nightmare. Even with constant supervision, licensed sturgeon fisheries exceed their allowance, and fisheries licensed to catch other fish illegally take the sturgeon that they catch in their nets. Some ecologists say the only way to effectively put a stop to the corruption is to impose a blanket moratorium on catching sturgeon and make possessing a sturgeon or fresh caviar an offense.


"The situation is catastrophic," says Dr. Yury Chuikov, chairman of the Astrakhan regional ecology committee. "The sturgeon is on the verge of dying out. We have to enforce a fishing ban in the Caspian or we risk losing this unique resource forever."


But preventing poaching on the hundreds of streams of the Volga delta is a near-impossible task. Lieutenant Chepinov is one of 25 members of an anti-poaching group assigned to cover a 40-mile stretch of river. He earns a little under $100 per month, about as much as a successful poacher makes in a couple of hours' work. Mass unemployment and the collapse of the shipping industry in the Volga delta have given the 1 million people who live on the lower Volga little choice but to fish for the long-nosed, spiny-backed, reptilian-looking sturgeon and their precious spawn.


"It may be illegal to catch sturgeon," Chepinov says. "But it's also a sin not to fish in the river if you live right by it."


But even more damaging than the small-scale sturgeon poaching that Chepinov battles is the illegal, large-scale sea fishing on the Caspian itself by gangs from neighboring Dagestan and its southern neighbor, Azerbaijan. Fishing in the open sea is especially damaging because the poachers net a large number of immature fish for every grown one, meaning that far more individual fish have to be killed per kilo of caviar. Sturgeon swim into fresh water to breed, so the fish caught in the river tend to be full-grown.


The seagoing gangs are well-organized, armed and dangerous. Policing the Caspian Sea is the job of Russia's border guards, who are equipped with navy gunboats and helicopters. But the border guards have little appetite for taking on the big poachers, largely because they've shown that they are not afraid to fight back. In 1996, a 200-kilo truck bomb demolished an entire apartment block in the Dagestani coastal town of Kaspisk, killing 68 people. Although no one was charged with the attack, local police have little doubt that the bombing was the work of the local caviar cartel, angered by the border guards stepping up their efforts to impound their catches and their boats. Last year, Kanibek Gazbiyev, a police colonel in charge of the Dagestan fishing police, was kidnapped by poachers and held for a week on the eve of a major operation. He was released unharmed, but his colleagues in Astrakhan joke that he has lost his appetite for catching poachers.


Even in Astrakhan, where the fight against poaching is more effective and less violent, the police are under few illusions about the corrupting power of the region's most lucrative industry.


"Look, how are we supposed to fight corruption when a police lieutenant doesn't make enough to feed his family?" one lieutenant colonel in the Astrakhan fisheries police says bitterly. "When he sees the poachers driving around in imported cars and laughing at him? How are we supposed to preserve our honor as policemen when we can't make a living? I have served 25 years and earn less than $300."


But despite the police's professed economic woes, nearly half of the cars in the parking lot of the dusty fisheries police building were BMWs or Volkswagens. When asked whose cars they were, the department's senior officers claimed they belonged to "visitors." The cars were in the same parking spaces three days in a row. Although 1,400 people were caught for poaching last year in the Astrakhan region, police admit that not one of them received a prison term, which could be up to three years for a convicted poacher. Most were instead fined between $40 and $2,500, the maximum penalty.


In 1994, under pressure from the World Wildlife Fund and the Convention on the Import of Endangered Species (CITES), the federal government launched a much-publicized anti-poaching effort called "Operation Putina," or Operation Net. Paramilitary OMON police were drafted in from neighboring Volgograd, local military units lent helicopters and the navy's Caspian flotilla pitched in gunboats to track down seagoing poachers. Roads going into the delta were closed and cars searched, hauling in a record quantity of poached caviar. But although Putina has become a yearly event, enthusiasm and funds for the operation have dwindled, and the fisheries police complain that this year, the local administration even refused to allocate the 60 tons of extra gasoline needed to fuel police cars and launches.


Ostensibly, the problem could be solved by a coordinated, Caspian-wide police operation similar to the original Putina. But there is little hope for a concerted effort until the former Soviet republics bordering the Caspian clarify the sea's political status. Negotiations have dragged on for four years as the countries haggle over the huge oil and gas deposits under the sea bed. Ironically, a settlement that could allow a serious assault on poachers would also lead to oil drilling in the North Caspian -- which could prove even more deadly for the sturgeon.


"There is a colossal conflict between oil interests and fishing interests," says Eduard Volodin, deputy governor of Astrakhan province. "But oil is a temporary resource, whereas sturgeon -- if properly managed -- is an eternal one. The problem is that when a country is poor, it looks at the short term and spits on the long term."


Volodin's fears are shared by Chepinov of the Astrakhan ecological committee, who fears that it is people like Volodin who will be seduced by the lure of lucrative oil deals and sell out the region's natural heritage.


"The first priority for the region's administration is to enable the local people to live a normal life, to be prosperous. This is a rule of politics," Chepinov says. "When it comes to a choice between the fish and the oil wealth, there is no doubt that the oil will eventually win -- unless the federal authorities step in to preserve the unique ecology of the Volga delta."


The natural gas giant Gazprom has already signed an exploration deal with the local administration, and the charter that protects the nature reserves of the delta has already been amended to allow test drilling. The shallow waters of the North Caspian and the thousands of rivulets of the delta are the sturgeons' spawning ground, and even a relatively minor oil spill could destroy them for generations. Ironically, the last three years have seen the ecological condition of the spawning grounds improve dramatically as the heavy industries on the Volga lie idle and collective farms cannot afford to use ecologically damaging nitrate fertilizers. That progress could be reversed overnight if drilling begins.


But until North Caspian oil comes online in an estimated 10 to 15 years, poaching remains the immediate danger. There is hope in a new international convention drawn up by CITES, the United Nations body that regulates trade in endangered species, which could cut off the poachers' favored export route through Turkey. Also, anyone carrying more than 200 grams of caviar into any CITES signatory country will be required to show documentation proving that it came from a legal source. Top Western caviar merchants are keen to see a crackdown.


"The market has been flooded with cheap, low-quality caviar costing as little as $50 a kilo," complains Armen Petrossian, owner of the Petrossian caviar shops in New York and Paris, while waiting for a flight in Astrakhan's airport. Petrossian says he buys only officially produced caviar for $320 a kilo from Russkaya Ikra. "If we can control the traders, then in turn, we squeeze the poachers and hopefully avoid having to impose a ban on fishing."


Vladimir Ivanov, head of the Caspian Fisheries Resources Institute and the region's leading expert on sturgeon, is less confident that the CITES ban will work. His institute monitors levels of sturgeon, sets quotas and ultimately could recommend that the federal government impose a total ban.


"I think we may well have to stop commercial sturgeon fishing next year, or at the latest the year after, to allow the stocks to recover," Ivanov. "Otherwise, we will have a very dangerous deficit of mature fish to breed from. If the mature fish are all caught, we will have to wait up to a decade for the young ones to grow to breeding age. A whole generation will be skipped."


Russkaya Ikra's Leontyev is taking no chances.


"We have come up with a pasteurization method that preserves the caviar for up to a year," he says proudly. "Just in case."