Sturgeons - on the agenda of the Caspian meeting in Baku
Yesterday, the Intergovernmental Commission for the Preservation, Rational Use of Aquatic Bioresources of the Caspian Sea and Management of Joint Reserves has started its work in Baku.
This is the first session of this body, composed of delegates of all Caspian countries - Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Russia. Until 2016, the commission had the interdepartmental status.
The measures to preserve a unique population of sturgeon are on the top of the session’s agenda.
In particular, the gathering will work out the issue of legal framing for the moratorium on sturgeon catch for a period of up to 25 years. The technical ban on catching sturgeon in the industrial volume has been in force since 2011. Small-scale fishing is carried out only for research and reproduction purposes.
“The conservation of sturgeon stocks in the Caspian Sea basin remains in priority for us. We consider it important to maintain the embargo on commercial fishing for sturgeon in the Caspian Sea. This measure is coercive, but in the present conditions is relevant”, said the representative of the Russian Federation, the head of the Federal Agency for Fishery Ilya Shestakov.
In the opinion of Mehman Akhundov, the director of the Azerbaijan Fisheries Research Institute, the possible signing of an interstate agreement will result in the “moratorium be implemented at another level - at the interstate level”.
90% of the world stock of sturgeon is concentrated in the Caspian Sea. Some species of sturgeon were entered in the Red List of International Union for Conservation of Nature.
According to Rauf Hajiyev, Deputy Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources of Azerbaijan, the number of sturgeon in the Caspian Sea decreased by 30 times in comparison with the 1980s, with a sharp drop since the earlier 1990s. As of 2010, the catch quota for each of the littoral countries was only one thousand tons.
The Baku meeting will work out of draft program of scientific and technical cooperation in the field of molecular genetic marking of sturgeons, reproduced at hatcheries and of a project for the All-Caspian trawl survey of sturgeon.
The special attention will be paid to the issues of interaction between the Caspian countries in the sphere of countering illegal extraction of aquatic biological resources in the Caspian Sea.
Three-days event will wrap up on 23 November.
