Exported across Europe, Romanian caviar was as legendary as it was expensive. In 1960s Britain, it was known as ‘millionaires’ food’, fetching more than £16 per lb and helping to prop up Romania’s shaky finances. “The state took everything back then,” Ivanov said.

Decades later, sturgeon stocks in the Danube have been decimated. In 2006, 17 years after the collapse of communism in Romania and a year before the country joined the European Union, Bucharest banned the fishing of sturgeon and subsequently extended the moratorium until 2021. Ukraine and Bulgaria have undertaken similar measures.

The ban and efforts to restock the Danube appear to have arrested the decline of some species. 

Police, however, say poaching remains widespread, while the causes are more complex than the measures taken to stamp it out imply, according to an investigation by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN, and the Center for Media, Data and Society at the Central European University.

The persistence of poaching, say local experts and fishermen, has its roots in decades of exploitation of fishing communities by state agencies and business interests and a failure to find for them alternative means of making money since sturgeon fishing was banned.

“A little help wouldn’t be bad,” said Rares Ivanov, a 40-year-old fisherman in Sfantu Gheorghe. 

“If they gave us a break, none of the fishermen would look for ways to avoid the law. They want us to turn to tourism? What should we feed the tourists? Fish from the supermarket?”

Dying breed

Poached sturgeons. Photo: Romanian border police

According to a study published in August 2019 by scientists at the Danube Delta National Institute for Research and Development, DDNI, there remain 26 species of sturgeon in the world, out of which only six can be found in the Danube in dramatically declining numbers. 

Of the six native sturgeon species that once used to migrate as far as Regensburg in Germany, only four survive today: the Russian sturgeon, the sterlet sturgeon, stellate sturgeon and the beluga sturgeon. 

The beluga, stellate and Russian sturgeon are listed as endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The sterlet sturgeon is listed as vulnerable to extinction. The Atlantic sturgeon, also once present in the region, was declared extinct in the Black Sea basin and the ship sturgeon is listed as “possibly extinct”.

Some estimates suggest just one per cent of the sturgeon that once populated the Danube now roam in the wild. 

The DDNI blames the dramatic decline in sturgeon populations on historical overexploitation, habitat reduction and the long lifespan and reproduction cycles of the fish. 

The August study cited dam construction, inland navigation development and flood protection as accelerating the decline, as well as the failure to enforce fishery regulations for more than a decade after the fall of communism in 1989.

It added, in English: “Poaching was and is still an existing threat as a lack of law enforcement still exists within the basin and the wild caviar is still demanded on the black market.”

Romania and the EU have spent over 18 million euros on restocking the Danube with sturgeon; over 10 million offspring, particularly beluga and Russian sturgeon, have been released into the wild, including 20,000 Russian sturgeon in May by the World Wildlife Fund, WWF, which leads the restocking effort in partnership with Romanian and Bulgarian state bodies.

According to the DDNI study, the stellate and beluga sturgeon populations have improved since the fishing ban and restocking and scientists say that wild spawning is still occurring naturally “at a significant rate”. The Russian sturgeon, however, still does not seem to be spawning in the wild.

“Until now in Romania, 600 000 offspring have been released into the wild. Bulgaria also released 600 000 offspring into the wild.” Cristina Munteanu, Manager of the FreshWater Department at WWF explained. “Restocking did not take place regularly, every year, and not even according to a plan. In the first years, it did happen every year and then it became more fragmented because, just as monitoring, it is very expensive.”

She said WWF has been focusing on informing and working stakeholders on conservation efforts. “We did not get involved in research because this implies a certain training that we could achieve, but which would require years,” she added.

Romania’s National Administration of the Danube Delta Biosphere, ARBDD, did not respond to an interview request.

Centuries-old traditions

The port of the village Sfantu Gheorghe, Tulcea, Romania. Photo: Wikipadia/Nowic

The first known record of Sfantu Gheorghe dates to 1318, when a Genovese merchant named Pietro Vesconte marked the fishing village on a map as San Georgio. 

The villagers say they were originally tribe of Zaporozhye Cossacks specialised in sturgeon fishing and who are thought to have moved from Ukraine to the Danube Delta. Even today, most of the villagers still speak Ukrainian and many fishermen remember a Ukrainian song the villagers traditionally sang on approaching land to let their wives known they were coming home.

Even before the communists took power, the villagers sold the best of their catch – the flesh and caviar – to Greek merchants.

“In fact, they were called chiscane which means offal, because they sold everything and they were left with only the entrails of the sturgeon,” said Nicu Efimov, the head of the village Fishermen Association.

A sturgeon fisherman since the early 1990s, Efimov now makes a living hosting tourists and demonstrating traditional fishing techniques he learnt from his father and grandfather.

The village’s original fishermen used rods anchored at the bottom of the sea, sometimes as deep as 70 metres, he said.

“Sturgeon fishing is hard work,” Efimov said. “The fish only moves during storms, when currents are strong. Many fishermen have died at sea because of it.”

“But the rods are now almost history. Few know how to fish that way nowadays.”

Overexploitation 

Illustration. Photo: EPA-EFE/CAROLINE BLUMBERG

Sturgeon fishing peaked in Romania in 1975, when the country exported roughly five tons of high-quality black caviar bearing Soviet labels.

“Until 1985, we worked with the Russian method: we prepared the caviar with boiled salt water,” said Natalia, a retired lab worker who spent 46 years helping to prepare caviar for export during the communist period and after.

“But in 1985 an Iranian businessman who had a contract with Romania’s state-owned Prodexport showed up with a television set and a VCR and showed us how they fished in the Caspian Sea with the Russians. So we started using nets to fish and to use sea salt to prepare the caviar.”

Nichita Timofei, a retired zootechnical engineer who headed the state-owned fishing company Piscicola for two years after the fall of communism, said the nets had caused “colossal damage”.

With the traditional rods, he said, the sturgeon could sometimes be damaged, “But it is a much more selective tool than the so-called tangle nets, which are basically endless fences in the Black Sea.”

Ivanov, Sfantu Gheorghe’s oldest fisherman, agreed: “It was the tangle nets that destroyed the Black Sea sturgeon,” he said. “The first time we used the tangle nets, we caught the Black Sea sturgeon, then from one year to the next it disappeared. Then we only caught starry [stellate] sturgeon. And then only small fish, three to five kilos.”

In 1992, a private company called Romsturio took charge of sturgeon fishing and trade. 

The system, Natalia said, was the same: the fishery bought the fish from the fishermen and sold it to clients around the world. The main buyer of beluga caviar was the same Iranian businessman who packed it under his own label, “probably Caspian Sea caviar”, Natalia said.

In 2005, Romsturio was accused of poaching by environmentalists from the Bucharest-based Save Danube Delta NGO, which spent years lobbying for a fishing ban. 

Romsturio went bankrupt in 2012, the same year that its owner, Dan Lucian Rusan, was charged with poaching. Rusan was acquitted, though the court ruled to confiscate some 140 kilos of sturgeon flesh from various species that prosecutors found on his property. 

According to court records, the company faced legal disputes over lingering debts to business partners until November 2019. BIRN contacted activists from Save Danube Delta NGO and the owner of Romsturio but received no response from either. 

Handsome black market prices

Poached sturgeons. Photo: Romanian border police

Though official statistics are scarce, police reports and smuggling cases suggest poaching in Romania remains lucrative.

Fishermen interviewed for this story gave varying black market prices, but it is believed that a kilo of caviar can cost 1,000 euros, while restaurants pay 100 euros per kilo of fish. Such figures tally with those quoted in police reports.

In a recent case in November 2019, a decomposing 1.7-metre sturgeon weighing some 15 kilos was found on a bank of the Danube near the port of Galati in eastern Romania. 

Local police said poachers probably caught the endangered fish in the hope of taking its caviar but realised that, as with most sturgeon released in the wild by the Romanian government in recent years, the fish was fitted with a microchip for monitoring purposes. So they discarded it.

At the end of September 2019, the Danube Delta Police, one of many government agencies tasked with oversight of the fishing ban, announced that they had released a 200-kilogram beluga trapped in rods placed by poachers in the Black Sea south of Sfantu Gheorghe. Its caviar was worth some 20,000 euros, the police said in a press release. 

The Danube Delta Police reported that in the past five years it had confiscated some 52 tons of poached fish, of which sturgeon accounted for more than 640 kilos. The Romanian Border Police also said that in the past four years it had seized half a ton of sturgeon and another half ton of caviar.

In April 2019, the border police launched an internal investigation after a surveillance camera in the Sfantu Gheorghe area was reported broken during a sea storm at the end of March, when a boat carrying Colombian cocaine capsized in the vicinity of the fishing village and dispersed its cargo all along the Romanian stretch of the Black Sea coast.

Then minister of Interior Carmen Dan told journalists in a press conference on April 8 that the system could not be turned off, but could have been functioning at a “reduced capacity”. 

Sources in the Border Police, speaking on condition of anonymity, said there were suspicions the camera “malfunctioned on purpose”, to allow poachers to collect the sturgeon during the stormy weather in March.

In October 2019, the Border Police announced a six-million-euro upgrade of the SCOMAR Black Sea video surveillance system.

Multiple efforts are underway to protect the sturgeon.

In June 2019, the National Administration of the Danube Delta Biosphere announced a 10-million-euro project to reassess management of the Delta. 

In coordination with conservation and environmental protection bodies, the agency plans to map the fauna of the Delta, reassess the relationship between local communities and protected areas and come up with a strategy to protect biodiversity for another 10 years. 

Between 2006 and 2011, the agency financed a Monitoring Station for Migratory Fish, while since 2018 the DDNI has been running a project called ‘Sturgeonomics’, in which researchers from Romania, France and Germany are working on identifying a gene that determines the gender of fish so that breeders would know which fish is female and which is male. 

And at the end of October 2019, over 120 environmentalists and experts in wildlife conservation from across Europe met in Galati, a port town on the Danube in eastern Romania, at the biggest conference on sturgeon conservation the country has ever seen. 

Scientists from 17 European countries and North America signed a declaration calling on authorities to step up the fight to protect endangered fish, including the creation of more sturgeon farms, close monitoring of fish in the wild and an extension to the fishing ban beyond 2021.

‘Recipe for poaching’

Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve Authority’s Head Office in the City of Tulcea, Tulcea County, Romania. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Trygve W Nodeland

But in the city of Tulcea, the gateway to the Danube Delta Biosphere, Valentin Moldoveanu, a sociologist who manages Flag Delta Dunarii, a public-private partnership for sustainable fishing, said successive Romanian governments after the fall of communism had failed to pursue a coherent policy to protect the environment and the people who depend on it.

“The biggest problem with the ban on sturgeon fishing – which was the main income source for the fishermen in Sfantu Gheorghe who were actually renowned for the quality of the caviar and of the fish – is that they haven’t received anything in return: no subsidies, no damages,” said Moldoveanu. “That was a recipe for poaching to flourish.”

Even so, he said, fewer and fewer fishermen know how to use the rods or tangle nets properly to make real money out of poaching. Most professionals have switched to other fish, such as mackerel, or now work abroad.

Rares Ivanov, one of the few young fishermen left in Sfantu Gheorghe, said those like him who catch mackerel or other small fish are registered as self-employed, pay taxes and make little money.

They feel watched, he said, and criminalised by the tight controls they are subjected to by law enforcement agencies that raid their boats in search of illegal catch.

Local corruption and poaching exist, Ivanov said, but they are merely the result of a long history of exploitation. 

“No fisherman in this village has ever become rich by selling caviar or sturgeon,” he said. “We were always forced to sell the fish at very low prices and other people made the big money.”

“The local value of a kilo of caviar was a litre of moonshine, some 10-20 euros. While on the international market, the company selling it earned 1,000 euros.” So some fishermen would keep a few jars of caviar aside, to sell to tourists.

Similarly under communism, Ivanov said, the authorities kept a tight lid on information. The fishermen turned over the fish and took their salaries and bonuses in return. Only when they found out the real value of their catch did they try to profit too.

“The ban came, but poaching goes on,” Ivanov said. “And it’s not people from the village. Despite all the sturgeon farms they’ve set up, wild sturgeon keeps popping up in restaurants in Tulcea. Officially, they say it’s from a farm, but with a hidden camera you find out it was wild sturgeon.”

Besides catching mackerel, Ivanov makes ends meet by taking in tourists during the summer and offering them a taste of traditional local cuisine.

In for the long-haul 

Ebro Delta in Spain. Photo: Pixel/Wikipedia

It’s not only in the Danube that conservation efforts are under way.

In Spain, the Migratoebre project aims to repopulate the Ebro Delta with sturgeon by making it easier for fish to negotiate the Xerta and Asco dams with lifts and ramps.

As yet, there is no sturgeon in the Ebro. Those involved plan to bring some young sturgeon from a breeding centre in France, but they need 15-16 years for reproduction.

“At the pace this species grows I don’t think I’ll live to see it,” said Marc Ordeix, the 53-year-old director of the Mediterranean Rivers Studies Centre, which is taking part in the project.

“Compared to the Danube, the Ebro [project] is nothing,” he said.

And while the scale of the projects differ vastly, so too do the circumstances facing local fishermen. Local communities around the Ebro continue to make a decent living from catching other fish. Some are now involved in eco-tourism, something those involved in the Danube efforts should look to, said Ordeix.

He also identified the importance of regional coordination. 

“If all countries don’t apply the same rules, then we have a problem,” Ordeix said.

Clams, tourism and the future

Danube Delta in Romania. Photo: Nicu Farcas/Wikimedia commons

Moldoveanu of Flag Delta Dunarii, the sustainable fishing association in Tulcea, said the efforts of the WWF and the Romanian government were paying off, with strong populations of sturgeon offspring in the Lower Danube.

“I think that in a few years we’ll have beautiful individuals,” he said. “But the Delta is not just sturgeon. It’s over 25 species of fish all endangered to some degree and which need coherent policies to restock.”

But he lamented the effects on local fishermen. Regulations on the equipment they can use had changed so many times that they can barely use any of their tools, he said, and cannot afford to buy modern equipment.

What has been lost in Sfantu Gheorghe in terms of heritage, he said, is unlikely to be recovered.

The association Moldoveanu manages is at the start of a two-year study on whether harvesting clams along the seashore would be a viable alternative for the Sfantu Gheorghe community. 

But the project is in its infancy; scientists will need two years to complete the study and it will take even more time – and an initial 60,000-euro initial investment in equipment – for fishermen for forget sturgeon and turn to clams, he said.

In Sfantu Gheorghe, Efimov said that after the ban most villagers turned to agro-tourism or eco-tourism. 

“The people didn’t receive much help, but they tried to survive by taking tourists into their homes during the summer and using the fishing boats for trips around the Delta,” he said.

“I think that if we really tried, we could put everything in harmony. We went to all sorts of meetings, strived to find solutions, but, as we have grown accustomed to in Romania, they listen, they take notes and they do nothing. They launch projects, they announce investments, but when it’s time for results…”

This investigation is the result of “Black Waters – A collaborative investigative journalism project into corruption and the environment” implemented by Balkan Investigative Reporting Network in partnership with Atlatszo and the Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS), Central European University (CEU) and supported by Open Society Foundation.