August 06, 2021
The government says that caviar production has shot up to 12 tons this year, a huge jump from just one ton eight years ago in the Persian year 1392, ending March 20, 2014.
The total is still, of course, nowhere near the 300 tons a year that prevailed in the 1980s.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was no Russian enforcement of fishing limits in the Caspian and overfishing quickly destroyed the industry.
Several years ago, the five Caspian coastal states agree to halt sturgeon fishing indefinitely to let the sturgeon stock grow back. Iran, meanwhile, had already started sturgeon farms with fish caged near the coast in an effort to start a new industry of farmed fish, which seems now to be working on at least a limited scale.