The other black gold

National Interest, The, Summer, 2005 by Julia Watson

BELLY UP to a bar in 19th-century New York, and chances are you would have been standing close to a bowl of caviar serving peanut duty on the counter to encourage a profitable thirst among the punters. The glistening beads would not have made the long haul from Persia or Imperial Russia. They would have been fished from wild sturgeon undulating their way up the Delaware, Columbia and Hudson Rivers of the east coast of the United States.

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By the end of the "Gay '90s", the United States was the largest caviar producer in the world, processing over 600 tons a year. It shipped most of its product to Europe, where Russian caviar labels were stuck on and much of it imported back into the United States. Nearly 90 percent of so-called Russian caviar sold in Europe and the United States in fact came from the Delaware River. Until the American sturgeon was fished to near extinction in the early 1900s, around 150,000 pounds of caviar were harvested annually from native waterways. The meat of the plundered fish became a mainstay of the local diet known as "Albany beef." Young boys played football in the streets of New York with the large sturgeon muzzles.

Containing 47 vitamins and minerals, caviar is one of the most nutrionally complete foods. The ancient Persians, who believed it cured a ream of ailments, called it "Chav-Jar", or "Cake of Power", and consumed it regularly to improve their stamina. They probably didn't eat as much as Czar Nicholas II of Russia, who taxed sturgeon fishermen eleven tons of top-grade caviar annually. Organized caviar production even took place on the Gironde in 18th-century France, under the auspices of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister to Louis XVI of France.

Caviar hasn't always been viewed as a luxury by everyone. During the Second World War, when British sailors of the Arctic convoys lying at anchor in Murmansk were offered dishes of the gleaming eggs by Russian sailors' wives honoring their heroic passage through the ice floes, they dismissed it disparagingly as fish jam. Telling them caviar featured in Aristotle's writings would not have swayed them. But they might have been impressed to learn the sturgeon evolved before the dinosaur, more than 250 million years ago, and that the Beluga, the most prized sturgeon of all, can live for 150 years, grow to nearly 20 feet, and weigh more than 2,500 pounds. At least it could until recently, when pollution changed its conditions for the worse. Bottom feeders, the Caspian sturgeon has been found to suffer from muscle degeneration caused by exposure to toxic pollutants from petroleum and heavy metals in the mud.

Under particular circumstances, caviar can be viewed without the respect commonly its due. In Soviet Moscow of the 1980s, when acquiring supplies unremarkable in the West was a daily challenge, the foreign editor of the Washington Post came to visit his correspondent. Dinner was arranged with members of the foreign press. "Oh, my!" exclaimed the editor, upon spying the gleaming mountain of Beluga surrounded by quarters of lemon on the table. "Where did you get that caviar?" "Oh, Lord!" moaned the deprived ex-pat scribes, "Where did you get those lemons?"

With the collapse of the Soviet Union came the rise in caviar poaching. In 1994, Russian government officials arrested 1,452 poachers, confiscating over 120 tons of caviar. Seven illegal caviar processing plants were shut down. By 2000, Russian organized crime gangs were believed responsible for a 97 percent decline in official catches in the Caspian Sea basin, the chief source of caviar with 60 percent of the world's supply. At the end of that same year, officially recorded catches of sturgeon in the Caspian were down to 550 tons, from 20,000 tons in the late 1970s. With the Caspian shoreline too long to be easily patrolled, and with sales of caviar so lucrative, it's not surprising that much of the smuggling is done with the complicity of corrupt officials in the countries that border the sea.

Four years ago, however, Iranians in the southern part of the massive sea began raising sturgeon fingerlings to restock the Caspian. Twenty-five million were released in 2000 into the sea's cleaner, deeper southern waters. Iran has also ended its state monopoly on the export of caviar in an attempt to revive the industry.

But given the time it takes for a sturgeon to mature and release its eggs, reversing the situation will not happen quickly. The female Beluga sturgeon, whose eggs are large, soft and creamy, light to dark gray, needs 18 years to mature, which partly accounts for caviar's high price. An Osetra will deliver her golden-yellow to light brown eggs at twelve to 15 years of age. The most prolific sturgeon is the Sevruga, whose eggs--the smallest--are produced at seven years.

The price of Russian and Iranian caviar, never a snip, has risen to around $180 an ounce since August 31, 2004. This is the date all exports of 2004 caviar were halted by the United Nations until the main exporting countries (the culprits to insert here are Russia in prime place, followed by Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) provide an accurate measurement of their wild sturgeon harvest and come to an agreement over effective resource management, in an effort to protect endangered wild sturgeon. The ruling has been as hard to enforce as the conservation measures imposed on the same countries in June 2002. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, an international treaty with over 160 signatory nations that made these demands, has no control over the Russian domestic market, whose large appetite has helped keep prices high as sturgeon are being fished out. In the past two decades, the world's Beluga sturgeon population has declined 90 percent.

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The other black gold

National Interest, The, Summer, 2005 by Julia Watson

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