Iran Triggers £4m Rush for Caviar

A tonne of caviar has been put up for auction in Britain by Iran and is expected to make more than £4m.

Iranian caviar is among the best in the annual £50m global trade but is seldom available in Britain. The publicly advertised sale was described as highly unusual by industry experts, who noted that Iran had doubled its annual production of beluga caviar, despite the scarcity of sturgeon eggs caused by overfishing.

A favourite of tsars and shahs, and more recently oligarchs, caviar is now more sought after than ever. But the elite's appetite for luxury has driven sturgeon, a fish as old as the dinosaurs, to the brink of extinction. The world population of the fish has been cut by up to 70 per cent in recent decades, according to WWF, formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature.

The beluga, the biggest sturgeon, is now so rare that little more than 100 a year are caught. Their eggs have a market value of nearly £500 per 50g, so Iran's sale of 200kg of the 'black gold' should fetch £2m or more. Iran is also selling 700kg of oscietre caviar and 100kg of sevruga caviar.

Peter Rebeiz, chairman of Caviar House & Prunier, in London, which buys and farms the delicacy, said: 'Normally the Iranians would distribute this among their target buyers, not in a national newspaper. They've gone over the heads of their 10 to 15 buyers around the world. It may be because they now have to by Iranian law, or it might be a desperate attempt to sell at the price they want.'

Rebeiz said he thought it unlikely that high street retailers would bid directly because of the complex quota paperwork involved, but added: 'Who knows, maybe British Airways will come along and buy it for their first-class passengers.'

'This is the first time the Iranians have come up with 20 per cent beluga in many years,' said Rebeiz. 'People have been saying, "There's no more beluga, the beluga is dead." You can't import into it the US and we were looking at beluga as 1 or 2 per cent of all caviar. But this clearly indicates the population has increased.'

The Caspian Sea produces 90 per cent of the world's caviar and is harvested by Iran, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Russia, which is the biggest consumer.

Export quotas have been imposed on them by a UN agency, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites). But the lack of state regulation in the former Soviet republics has been blamed for a failure to tackle excessive fishing and black market poaching.

David Morgan, chief of the scientific support unit at Cites, said: 'The quantities of sturgeon fished in the Caspian Sea have collapsed in the past 20 years or so, to the extent that the species are threatened with extinction. We have to some extent stabilized the situation, but the amount of money that can be made from these species is staggering, so there's a lot of pressure.

'The Islamic Republic of Iran is the best of the bunch in the Caspian. They're doing a good job of regulation. The labeling of tins is such you can trace caviar back to the fisherman who caught it.'

Caspian countries have attempted to replenish stocks by releasing millions of fingerlings into the sea, although sturgeon take 15 years to mature sexually before producing eggs. There has been a growth in caviar farming in countries such as France and Spain, but wild caviar is still significantly more expensive than the farmed variety, although many people find it difficult to tell the difference in blind tastings.

The threat to sturgeon in the Caspian remains 'deadly serious', according to Julia Robertson of the ocean conservation group SeaWeb. 'We're talking about the potential extinction of a 200-million-year-old "fossil fish",' she warned. 'These are slow-maturing, long-lived species and they cannot withstand the pressure from overfishing and poaching. Iranian scientists estimate that sturgeon could be extinct within 14 years if poaching is not controlled.'