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Каспинфо июль 2001 |
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Название: Материалы на английском - II Главные Пункты: * Проф. Н.Миязаки из Японии утверждает, что причиной сокращения популяции каспийских тюленей вдвое за последние несколько лет являются хлор-органические вещества, поступающие в море из рек. * ЮНЕСКО одобрила международный проект ВОЛГА-Каспий, и, если ООН примет его, то финансирование начнется уже в 2002 г. * От Геленджика до Юж.Озерейки в начале августа пройдет акция Экологический Караван мира, цель которой - добиться проведения референдума по проекту КТК и донести до сведения местных властей и руководства КТК и Голубого потока идею создания независимых служб экологического мониторинга с участием экспертов НПО. * В.Миронов, директор "Русской икры", утверждает, что принимаемые CITES меры по сохранению осетровых на Каспии неэффективны; по его словам, на Каспии много осетра, но вылавливают рыбу браконьеры, а не государство. * Россия, исполняя решение CITES, прекращает лов осетра на Каспии с 20 июля 2001 г. (06.07.2001) Полный Текст Материалы на английском - II Материалы на английском - II *** Great Russian Killer River Moscow News, June 13, 2001 By Yelena Subbotina "How can we make sure that great rivers do not lead to great problems?" Sergei Kiriyenko asked opening the Great Rivers-2001 forum. Thus the presidential envoy to the Volga Federal District outlined the key issue on the agenda of a forum that has for three years been held under the auspices of the Nizhny Novgorod Fair. The question could hardly have been more timely: Just then the great Siberian river Lena was flooding Yakutia. The event was graced by the presence of Thor Heyerdahl, sprightly and full of new ideas. In late May, when the international academic beau monde met in Nizhny Novgorod, it became clear how many people in various environmentally safe parts of the world are concerned about the condition of a river that flows exclusively across Russia and falls into an inland sea. Great Rivers is a kind of environmental Davos: The forum discusses not only the ecological situation (mostly deplorable), but also international environmental and political projects. There were 10 sections that heard about 400 papers. Since the article cannot accommodate a list of all the subjects addressed, I will touch on just two: the federal Volga Revival program and the international UNESCO-launched Volga-Caspian Sea project. It would be difficult to find a more appropriate venue for discussing the fate of great rivers than Nizhny Novgorod, the very center of which is at the confluence of the Oka and the Volga at the foot of a high, steep hill. This epic scenery is certainly thought-provoking, but the thoughts can hardly be called pleasing. You will perforce recall Oka banks sliding off into the river together with residential settlements (which happened because sand had been scooped out with gay abandon), the "fox tails" of industrial waste drifting over the water, the flows of filth gushing out of countless pipes and straight into the Oka, and even feces floating in the Volga near Nizhny. Environmental pollution in the Volga basin, where approximately half the country's population lives, is three to five times higher than the Russian average while the strain on water resources exceeds average indicators up to eight times. It is appropriate to remember that three years ago the government approved a federal program, Volga Revival. Reviving the great river is a formidable challenge. A 70-percent production decline in industry failed to make the water clean, and this is hardly surprising: Say, in the Astrakhan region, 50 percent of sewage disposal systems do not have purification facilities while in the Saratov region it's a whopping 80 percent. The shocking statistics were announced at the congress by Vladimir Chiburayev, a spokesman for the Sanitary and Epidemiological Supervision Committee. Furthermore, the city of Dzerzhinsk, on the Oka, not far from where it flows into the Volga, is a center of military chemical production that has contaminated everything for miles and miles around. And although toxic agents have now given way to "civilian" chemistry, this has done little to alleviate the situation. According to the city sanitary and epidemiological supervision center, a probe conducted in the last week of April showed that the Oka water had 15 times the maximum permissible concentration (MPC) of manganese, 20 times the MPC of oil products, and five times the MPC of phenols. And that is river water used as potable water. The Volga basin features a high concentration of military chemical facilities. It is home to three-fourths of the country's chemical weapon stocks, and we have been seeing persistent attempts to destroy these lethal stockpiles near the rivers, in violation of existing safety rules. Given that approximately half of Russia's entire population lives in or around the Volga basin while clean water here is a rarity (not more than 3 percent), it becomes clear that the Volga Revival program is our last hope. Some of the best brains worked on it, providing for well thought-through measures: environmentally-friendly development of industry and agriculture as well as urban development; restoration of specially protected natural areas; protection of fish stocks; environmental monitoring; law-based regulation, and scientific support. The program produced a good impression not only on the Russian public. Evaluating the program, Peter Bridgewater, deputy UNECO director general (also director of the Division of Ecological Sciences), who attended the first Great Rivers-1999 forum, said that it was thoroughly thought out, up to modern standards, and ensured sustainable development, adding that he thought Russia would be invited to join in a major Volga-Caspian Sea international project. Our program is good but there is no money to pay for it. If the funding remains at its present level that is, some 10 percent of the required amount a year the river will die before we scrape up the money to reanimate it. Luckily, the industrialized world is ready to help us: The Volga-Caspian Sea international project was approved by the UNESCO Council and should the October General Assembly session adopt it, funding could begin in 2002. This large-scale project is designed to improve the environmental situation, preserve endemic species, and ensure sustainable development of the region. The fate of the great salty lake a unique inland basin that is being affected by a lethal accumulation of toxic waste worries scientists. All the indications are that the UN will in the foreseeable future produce a document based in international law on the status of the Caspian. The forum heard a very interesting report by Prof. Nabuyuki Miyazaki (director of the Marine Research Center, Tokyo University) about Caspian seals. Prof. Miyazaki has long worked in Russia, initially studying seal cubs on Lake Baikal, but for the past 10 years working on the Caspian, which he has explored as well as the Sea of Japan. So, according to the professor, twice in recent years in 1997 and 2000 the seal population fell off considerably. The animals died of seal plague because their natural immunity had been suppressed by chloro-organic pollutants, including DDT. That toxic agent was brought into the sea by the rivers above all, the Volga which accounts for 80 percent of the water and therefore for as much hazardous waste that can be lethal to the world's largest salt lake. And one final point. Programs alone are not enough to save the Volga and with it the Caspian. The river needs a good manager one, not a great number, as is the case today, when every department is in charge of its own section. This manager could be called, say, the Greater Volga Russian joint-stock company or a state-run enterprise anything as long as it takes good care of our main river. That was what Sergei Kiriyenko told the forum. No one objected to that. Russian Environmental Digest -- the world's major English-language press on environmental issues in Russia11 June - 17 June 2001, Vol. 3, No. 24 *** Environmental Peace Caravan in the North Caucasus An environmental Peace Caravan will travel at an early August of this year from Gelenjik to Yuzhnaya Ozereika (Russian Black Sea shore). The Caravan will bring together public organizations activists and local citizens. This action is one of the last attempts to stop the illegal and environmentally dangerous projects of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) and the Blue Stream which are able to destruct the unique coastal ecosystem. The first CPC tanker will be filled in with the Caspian oil at the 6th of August, 2001. Unfortunately in spite of many attempts to prevent the TNCs activity, such as legal sues or efforts to organize the local referendum on the CPC project, in spite of the strong support to environmentalists from 90% of the residents, local powers still remain the proponents of the projects and roughly block all the democratic procedures concerning the TNCs. The Peace Caravan aims to try another one time to win the right for the referendum. The organizers also plan to inform the local powers and the CPC and the Blue Stream top management about an idea to establish independent environmental monitoring services with experts from public environmental organizations participation. During the Caravan travel there will be different kinds of actions: demonstrations, public lectures, concerts, meetings between environmentalists and local self-governing bodies members. We need your support! If you can: - to take part in the Caravan - to disseminate the information about the Caravan and the CPC and the Blue Stream dangerous activity (see Projects Files below) - to send us a support letter - to send a protest to companies involved in the CPC and the Blue Stream (see Project Files below) - to donate of fundrise for the Caravan - to share your experience in fighting against TNCs PLEASE CONTACT US! Looking forward for the cooperation, Anna Kochineva, SEU press-secretary kochineva@mail.ru, seupress@online.ru Andrew Rudomaha, Independent Ecological Service for North-West Caucasus (IES) ies@mail.ru PROJECT FILES The CPC The CPC is one of the biggest oil projects in the former USSR area financed by private companies. The co-founders of the CPC are: Chevron (USA), Lukarco (Russia-USA), Rosneft-Shell (Russia - the Netherlands), Mobil (USA), British Gas (UK) and others. The pipeline terminal is carried out to sea near the future biosphere nature reserve Utrish 20 km far from both the city of Novorossiisk and the children resort of Anapa. During the terminal construction Russian legislation norms were systematically ignored. The CPC destroyed the relic juniper copse without the environmental examination required by law. The Governor of Krasnodar region issued a decree that gave the CPC a huge plot of land for use with no fixed term that contradict the Russian Land Use Code. In addition, many sites inhabited by endangered species were also destroyed by CPC. The Blue Stream The Blue Stream is the gas pipeline construction project. The pipeline will be laid through the Black Sea at the 2500 meters deep between Russian and Turkish seashores. The mail founder of the Blue Stream is Gazprom. During the pipeline construction the illegal logging in the huge massif of endangered Crimea pine and Pitsunda pine was performed. The Blue Stream project did not pass the compulsory procedure of the state environmental examination as well. CENN is a moderated mailing list created by Caucasus Environmental NGO Network (CENN) *** The Moscow Times - Monday, Jul. 2, 2001. Page 12 End of Caviar As We Know It? By Christopher Pala Special to The Moscow Times Russia and two other countries have temporarily banned fishing for sturgeon to protect dwindling stocks. As Christopher Pala reports from Ikryanoye, or Caviartown, the fish prized for producing caviar may have outlived the dinosaurs, but they may not long outlive communism. In a sprawling fish farm 50 kilometers north of Astrakhan, on the verdant banks of a Volga River swollen by spring rains, some 200 female sturgeon, each about a meter long, swim slowly in the greenish waters of one of the large ponds. These females were raised here and underwent the fish equivalent of a cesarean section. In a matter of minutes, they were anesthetized, their bellies were opened, the roe was taken out, they were sewn up again and were returned to the water. The operation is not a more humane way to satiate the craving for caviar of the truly rich - the female is normally killed before the eggs are extracted - but a desperate attempt to continue the yearly release of 50 million baby fish, hatched from eggs taken from females swimming up the Volga. The Bios hatchery, located outside Astrakhan in the village of Ikryanoye, literally Caviartown, releases 2 million of those fingerlings, as the little squiggling fish are properly called, into the Volga just above the head of its delta. Helping Hand Hatcheries like Bios - there are seven on the Volga - play a key role in keeping the Caspian sturgeon alive. After growing up at sea, about 70 percent of the scaly, pointy-nosed fish head for the Volga to mate, while another 15 percent go up the Ural River, in Kazakhstan; 10 percent spend most of their life in Iranian waters; and 5 percent reproduce in the small rivers of Azerbaijan and Dagestan. As for Turkmenistan, the last of the Caspian states, it is largely devoid of rivers and sturgeon do not mate there. The construction of a dam at Volgograd in 1960 deprived the sturgeon of their main spawning grounds further upriver. Despite the image of caviar as a delicacy for tsars, decadent aristocrats and fat- cat capitalists, the Soviets took the threat seriously and banned all fishing at sea, built a string of hatcheries and retrofitted four ships to take the fingerlings to the best feeding grounds, on the coast west of the estuary, thus cutting the number of fingerlings eaten by other fish on their way down the river. Thanks to those ships, the proportion of fingerlings that survived the decade or so at sea to sexually mature and return to the Volga to reproduce tripled from 1 percent to 3 percent. The Caspian became a giant fish farm. Virtually all of today's beluga - the largest and scarcest species and the one that takes longest to reach maturity - were born in hatcheries, some for the second generation, along with about half of the sevruga and the osyotr, the two other commercial sturgeon species. Alexander Kitanov, who describes himself as Bios' "fishmaster," explained that in order to release 2 million fingerlings a year, he must pick and choose the females of ideal size and condition among the sturgeon hauled in nets from the river. The catch earmarked for the hatcheries - 120 tons of fish this year - is separate from the catch for the sale of caviar and meat. "Even five years ago, we could only take the females in ideal condition and let the rest go," he said. "The caviar from the really big fish - 150, 200 kilograms - is tasty, but most of the eggs don't hatch. And the same is true of the eggs of females that are too young." But today, he said, the haul of mature females has been cut so drastically by poachers that he has to take all the eggs he can get. "Eighty percent of the females we're seeing aren't fully mature," he said. As a result, the proportion of eggs that do hatch has plummeted. "The poachers used wide-mesh nets because they wanted big fish," said Sveta Bolshakova, an ichthyologist with 17 years' experience in sturgeon research. "Now that most of the big ones are gone, the younger females are starting to reproduce before they are fully mature. Their offspring are going to be fewer and weaker. "Usually when man intervenes in the breeding of animals it's for a purpose, to improve them in some way," she said. "Here, man is involuntarily weakening the species." So as a hedge against a further decline in the catch of pregnant females, the Bios hatchery began a unique program: performing cesarean operations on a stock of captive sturgeon that had been raised for commercial purposes and raising their fingerlings in order to release them in the river once they are 40 days old. The females are kept in ponds until they can reproduce again two or three years later. Poachers' Take For fishermen and even poachers, the evidence of overfishing was clear as this year's March to June season drew to a close: Each year it becomes harder and harder to net sturgeon. Caspian caviar exports have fallen from 2,000 tons in 1978 to 500 tons in 1991 to 160 tons last year. However, the figure for this year's official catch is misleading; scientists estimate that the poachers' take, both at sea and in the rivers, is 12 times the current official catch. Thus, if the official catch is worth $100 million, the illegal catch, though it fetches much less per kilogram, is probably several times more valuable than the legal one. There is wide consensus on who is the main culprit: fishermen in the Caspian Sea itself. Since the Soviet collapse and the general weakening of law enforcement, they have been laying wide-mesh nets off the coasts to catch only sturgeon, the largest fish in the sea. Stocks were halved in four years. "They don't care if the fish have eggs or not," said Kitanov. "For them, the meat is profitable enough." River poaching has worsened, too. While in Soviet days it was an amusing pastime - legal caviar cost 3 rubles a kilogram, old-timers remember - today it has become a business akin to drug running. The poachers use nets or lines dripping with hooks along the bottom of the river, pull them up at night, rip out the caviar and often toss back the dead sturgeon. They sell the caviar to illegal canneries where, in conditions more attuned to clandestine operations than to taste or hygiene, the caviar is salted and placed in cans and jars that imitate those used by legal canneries. These cans supply the Russian market and are exported to Turkey, the Gulf states or Eastern Europe, where customers and customs officials are not too demanding. As for the legal Russian canneries, in the last few years virtually all of their production has been for export. So as a result of the war on poachers, there is no caviar available in the stores of Astrakhan, in contrast with the rest of the country. Only through the judicious use of winks and nods can one open a can of fresh caviar. Stable Population Paradox Off a dusty avenue near the outskirts of Astrakhan, the first city that Ivan the Terrible retook from the Mongols in 1558, squats a rundown building that houses the Caspian Fisheries Research Institute. In a fourth-floor office, Raisa Khororevskaya, a senior researcher specializing in sturgeon population numbers, says that in 1994 half the Caspian sturgeon were fished off and the hatcheries' budgets were severely cut. The population has since stabilized at 35 million to 40 million sturgeon as the hatcheries resumed production. "The difference with 10 years ago," she said, "is that 90 percent of the young adults have been fished out. It's like after the Great Patriotic War - there are plenty of young ones, but most of the adults are gone." "The sturgeon is probably the single most vulnerable wildlife resource in the world today," said Robert Hepworth, a deputy director of the United Nations Environmental Program. A second paradox is that a part of UNEP that deals with the protection of endangered species, the Convention on the Trade of Endangered Species, or CITES, which began regulating the caviar trade in 1998, had given Iran, whose haul of sturgeon is a seventh of Russia's, an export quota of caviar of 82 tons to Russia's 50. That, according to Khororevskaya, is because the Iranians breed a subspecies of osyotr sturgeon known as the acipenser persicus that - unlike the Russian osyotr, the slender sevruga (both bottom feeders) or the predatory beluga - does not migrate around the Caspian but stays largely on its southern rim, which belongs to Iran. In addition, poaching in Iran is said to be minuscule in comparison with its post-Soviet neighbors. CITES expressed its disappointment on June 21 with three years of cajoling the post-Soviet states into making an effort to cut poaching, and effectively banned sturgeon harvesting as of July 20, drawing a protest from one of the fish's staunchest defenders. "It's not fair to ban fishing in Russia and Kazakhstan but not Iran," said Vladimir Ivanov, the director of the research institute. He pointed out that only two-thirds of Iran's export quota are Persian osyotr bred in Iranian hatcheries, while the rest are born in the wild or in Russian hatcheries. "It's particularly irritating to see that Iran exports 4 tons of beluga caviar, since today virtually all beluga are born in Russian hatcheries," he said. "They're very difficult to breed, and the Iranians don't know how to do it." Beluga caviar, the rarest of the commercial species, now retails in the West for $3,000 a kilogram - or, illegally, $60 a kilogram in Astrakhan and $200 a kilogram in Moscow. "Of course," Ivanov continued, "I hope this will motivate the Caspian nations to finally sign the agreement on Caspian bioresources they had prepared back in 1995." It provides for the creation of a joint force made up of law enforcement officials from five nations - considered less vulnerable to bribery than national forces - to staff anti-poaching patrols in the Caspian Sea. "At the time, they didn't want to sign the agreement because they wanted to wait for an agreement on the subsoil use - oil and gas, you know," he said. "But now, I think they will realize the gravity of the situation." The ban will remain in effect indefinitely unless the four states, at a meeting with CITES officials set for the end of the year, are able to convince the organization that they are making real progress in fighting poaching. So far, the states have invariably reported extensive measures and great progress. In a report, the secretariat of CITES said it "was not able to come to the conclusion on the adequacy of existing fisheries' management practices except that if harvest limits were adequate and if trade controls and enforcement were adequate as claimed, a marked decline in stocks and catches should not have occurred." Following Thursday's decision, "Any failure on the part of these states to implement this week's agreement will result in zero quotas for 2002," said Aveen Haller, a CITES official. For Vyacheslav Mironov, the director of Russkaya Ikra, or Russian Caviar - Astrakhan's oldest and largest caviar cannery - the decision could have been worse. CITES had embargoed the 2001 quotas of Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan - totaling 82 tons - until its meeting in Paris this week, and had threatened to ban exports if the riparian countries did not come up with a credible rescue plan. Mironov's 4 tons of caviar, already placed in 50- and 90-gram cans, held at minus 5 degrees Celsius, just above their freezing point, and destined mostly for Japan at prices of $600 to $900 a kilogram, will at last reach their market. "Still, to ban our exports is ridiculous," Mironov said. He pointed out that in 1999, when Russia's CITES quota was 30 tons, CITES itself reported receiving documentation for the export of 45 tons - 15 tons of which presumably had falsified papers. Meanwhile, he said, official Russian customs figures for that year showed exports of 486 tons - all but 30 tons of it illegal. "And we're not even counting illegal exports that don't even figure in customs statistics," he added. "Frankly, I don't think CITES controls have had any effect at all." "There is plenty of sturgeon in the Caspian," Mironov said. "It's just that the poachers are fishing it and not us." Out of Hand? How the post-Soviet governments will succeed in reversing these proportions and slashing the total amounts of fish caught remains an open question. Ivanov, the head of the research institute, expressed optimism. "I think the conditions are finally right for us to reverse the decline," he said.For Bolshakova, the veteran sturgeon specialist, the measures are not likely to succeed. "The species has been genetically weakened," she said. "There are more and more fish that are affected by pollution." Anti-poaching patrols have failed in the Volga, and they will continue failing in the sea, she said. "The area is just too big to control," she added, and the poachers are too powerful. Five years go, she recalled, in Dagestan, a truck bomb killed 68 people and destroyed an entire block of apartments of border guards, who are responsible for patrolling Russia's coastline. "To save the sturgeon, the West would have to pour in a lot of money for helicopters and ships and have a real multinational force patrol the sea," she said. "I don't think that's going to happen. In five years, there really won't be much left" of a sturgeon population that numbered 144 million in 1978. Related Articles Sturgeon Fishing Banned Until 2002 (Jun. 22) Kasyanov Considers Sturgeon Ban (Apr. 23) Subscribers Only *** The Moscow Times - Friday, Jul. 13, 2001. Page 6 MOSCOW (AP) - Russia will stop commercial fishing of Caspian Sea sturgeon as of July 20, part of an international effort to save the fish, which produce black caviar, from extinction, an official said Thursday. The move, announced by deputy head of the State Fisheries Committee Anatoly Makoyedov, stems from an agreement reached last month at the Paris meeting of the UN-affiliated Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan also have supported a temporary freeze on sturgeon fishing following a CITES threat to slap a total caviar export ban on the Caspian countries if they did not act to curb illegal fishing. Turkmenistan has yet to confirm that it, too, will halt fishing. Iran, the fifth Caspian nation, was not included in the agreement since its management of caviar exports has been deemed fairly effective. |