Bridges Trade BioRes • Volume 4 • Number 16 • 10th September 2004
CITES Grant Caviar Licenses to Black Sea Countries
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On 7 September officials from the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) published 2004 caviar export quotas for a number of Black Sea countries. Contrary to news coverage that suggested otherwise, Romania, Bulgaria, and Serbia and Montenegro were all granted licences to export caviar from sturgeon stocks monitored by CITES. CITES Secretary-General Willem Wijnstekers said that it was “encouraging that these sturgeon range States have collaborated successfully in order to comply with the conservation requirements that governments must now meet before they can obtain their annual quotas”. A number of other shared sturgeon basins, including the Caspian Sea, the Great Lakes of North America, the Azov Sea and the Amour River, have yet to supply the required conservation information and thus have not received 2004 export licences from CITES. Lisa Speer, senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council and spokesperson for Caviar Emptor, a coalition of three organisations seeking to protect and restore endangered Caspian Sea sturgeon, said the coalition was “very concerned that critically needed long-term conservation measures have yet to be implemented in the Caspian region”. In November 2002, the member governments of CITES developed a list of conservation measures that now apply to all of the world’s sturgeons and the Caspian states were granted quotas under these measures for both 2002 and 2003 (see BRIDGES Trade BioRes, 2 April 2004).
“CITES authorizes sturgeon export quotas for the Black Sea,” CITES, 7 September 2004; “Caviar Faces a Ban,” NYT, 1 September 2004; “U.N. agency says nations need to improve conservation,” MSNBC, 1 September 2004; “Wildlife Officials Shut Down Global Caviar Trade,” CAVIAR EMPTOR RELEASE, 1 September 2004.
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