Word: caspian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...International Energy Agency warned that OPEC's spare daily capacity may fall a million barrels short of demand during an Iraq war, China moved to cut its dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Two state-owned firms agreed to buy British BG Group's $1.2 billion stake in the Caspian, raising the chance of a pipeline to China...
...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. Today poachers supply some 300 tons of caviar per year, 10 times as much as legal traders. The temptations are great in a region where economic opportunities are scarce. In a typical bust, smugglers in the Russian county of Astrakhan managed to load an air-force cargo plane with almost 350 kilograms of sturgeon roe before it was seized by the Federal Security Service...
...Anatoli Vlasenko, deputy director of the Caspian Research Institute of Fisheries, disputes reports of the beluga's demise. "The 90% depletion figure is a 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. In the U.S., the demand for beluga caviar has led not just to illegal imports of what some call black gold but also...
...Caspian caviar gets harder to come by, all sorts of alternatives are popping up. Scientists can't get their hands on enough beluga sturgeon to start breeding them in the U.S. (there are fewer than five in the 50 states), but America does have its own natural population of sturgeon and sturgeonlike fish. Roe from native white sturgeon and its close cousin, the paddlefish, is becoming increasingly popular. Stolt Sea Farm, near Sacramento, California, has boosted production of its Sterling-brand caviar of farmed white sturgeon from 23 kilograms in 1995 to more than six tons a year...
...also osetra and sevruga. More than 100 U.S. chefs and retailers have signed a letter to Interior Secretary Gail Norton supporting a beluga ban. Among them is Rick Moonen, former chef of New York City's Oceana, who recently opened a new seafood restaurant called RM. "I always had Caspian caviar on my menus," says Moonen. But when he noticed a decline in the quality of Caspian caviar a few years ago, Moonen started shopping for alternatives. His menu currently features Blue Island oysters with cucumber sorbet and paddlefish roe, sea-urchin custard with champagne foam and rainbow-trout caviar...