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PRESS ADVISORY

CITES finalizes 2006 caviar export quotas

Geneva, 13 April 2006 – The Secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) has finalized the 2006 export quotas for sturgeon. This will enable Iran to export this year up to 44,370 kilogrammes of caviar from the Persian sturgeon.

The CITES Secretariat has not received the required information from the five Caspian Sea States that would allow it to publish quotas for wild specimens of the other sturgeon species in this shared basin. The deadline for the publication of export quotas for sturgeon products from shared stocks, established by the Conference of the Parties to CITES, has now long passed. The Secretariat will therefore not be publishing any more new quotas for the year 2006. In practice, this means that no imports of wild specimens of these sturgeon stocks should take place in 2006.

In the meantime, at the request of the CITES Standing Committee, the European Union will host a meeting in June devoted to tackling illegal trade in caviar. At this meeting, law enforcement agencies around the world will discuss how to improve their capacities to detect illegal trade in and sales of caviar.

The quotas for all sturgeon species from shared basins are posted at here. A Notification to the Parties on this issue is available here.

For more information: Contact Juan-Carlos Vasquez at +41-22-917-8156/28 or juan.vasquez@unep.ch; or Michael Williams at +41-79-409-1528 (cell), +41-22-917-8242 (office) or michael.williams@unep.ch.

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