Caspian Sea Caviar Exports OK’D

Caspian Sea caviar-selling countries may resume exports after proving their efforts to monitor the depletion of endangered sturgeon has improved.

Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan got the OK from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, known as Cites, in Geneva, Switzerland.

Cites banned most Caspian caviar exports last year because it said all Caspian countries but Iran had not provided enough information to determine how much of Caspian sturgeon stock had been depleted by poaching, pollution, overfishing and development, The New York Times reported.

Cites has set exporting quotas for the 2007 harvest of three kinds of sturgeon — sevruga, osetra from the northern Caspian and Iranian osetra.

Caviar is the processed salted eggs of sturgeon and sometimes other fish species.