Yet in restaurants in Romania’s Danube Delta or on the Bulgarian bank of the Danube, customers are served generous portions of wild sturgeon as if the menu outweighed the law.
Moreover, sturgeon caviar is sold by the roadside in Romania’s Tulcea region, straight from the boot of a car - with no paperwork and no fear of the ban.
In Bulgaria, caviar exports have become a global industry. Supposedly, the products come from farmed sturgeon, but the huge quantities shipped worldwide tell a different story.
Even from the Dniester, the river in the small Republic of Moldova that flows into the Black Sea, sturgeon are more likely to end up on poachers’ tables than in researchers’ records.
In two EU countries - Romania and Bulgaria - illegal sturgeon fishing is the rule rather than the exception. Only in court do poaching cases become exceptions. Rare ones.
Harsh laws exist. The cases in which the law is actually enforced, however, are like the sturgeon themselves: on the brink of extinction.
Image by Petru Zoltan.
