Protection, defection, and destruction

Bad eggs

The Diary points you to a Washington Post article this week that wept ‘bye-bye to beluga caviar’. It looks like these holidays may be the last in which America’s elite dinner tables are graced with the world’s poshest delicacy. From now on, it’s fried chicken all round.

The US Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service is considering listing the beluga sturgeon (what it calls ‘the most economically valuable fish in the world’) as endangered. And as logic dictates: no beluga sturgeon egg harvest, no beluga caviar. Result: lots of toffs go hungry.

So who’s to blame for this class-war outrage? Answer: Caviar Emptor, the delicately named coalition of environmentalists who filed a lawsuit in the spring against the Fish and Wildlife Service on behalf of the beluga sturgeons (this is America, folks). According to the enviros, the beluga population has decreased by about 90% over the past two decades. 90%! The price, it seems, of prosperity.

Current price in the US for exquisite roe: $1,500 per pound. That’s a lot of blinis. Globally, the Post tells us, the caviar trade is estimated at $100 million a year. The caviar black market is reckoned to be ‘at least ten times that amount’.

After a huge net is pulled across the river, an official fishermen brigade delivers the catch to a factory boat or the already waiting “mafia” of fish policemen. Photo credit: Hans-Jurgen Burkard/Bilderberg, courtesy of Caviar Emptor

In what some might call a strange twist of fate, the Post suggests that: ‘life was better for the beluga under the Czarist regime and the old Soviet Union.’ In those good old days, the caviar industry, like life itself, was strictly regulated. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Caspian Sea has been under constant assault from fishermen, poachers, dams, and pollution. Belugas are producing fewer and fewer eggs.

The US looks set to take action. The government has until 31 July 2003 to decide whether to list beluga as endangered as Saddam. If the hawks in the Bush administration come down on the caviar industry, there will be regime change on the platters of High Society.

Old friends

So has the US gone all environmental? Well, no. In the same week that a report appeared highlighting the alarming decline of glaciers in the Bolivian Andes, the latest examples of the admirable determination of the Bush administration to carve up the natural world hit the White House out-tray.

First, the news that two old stamping grounds of Bush and Cheney, Hunt Oil and Halliburton, are, in the words of the Washington Post, ‘lining up administration support for nearly $900 million in public financing for a Peruvian natural gas project that will cut through one of the world’s most pristine tropical rain forests.’

The $1.6 billion Camisea project is the subject of fierce opposition from environmentalists the world over. One of its aims is to start exporting liquid natural gas to the US by 2006. The $900 million public handout would come in handy to the pipeline consortium which was fined the sum of $1 million last month by the Peruvian Energy Ministry after it destroyed parts of a protected nature reserve. The pipelines will go straight through the Paracas National Reserve, Peru’s only marine sanctuary. Fuel spills and landslides are already problems. But will this stop Bush signing a cheque for his old company?

Next up, logging. According to the Associated Press, reported in the International Herald Tribune, ‘The Bush administration is proposing to give managers of the nation’s 155 national forests greater leeway to approve logging and commercial activities with less examination of potential environmental damages.’

The White House claims that complying with requirements for ecological sustainability made under the Clinton administration ‘would be difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish.’ So they’ve gone. No more maintenance and monitoring of wildlife populations. In the words of Robert Dewey, vice-president of Defenders of Wildlife, ‘It’s a blatant effort by the Bush administration to boost logging and help the timber industry, which had a clear hand on the pen of these regulations.’

And finally, who can forget Bush’s ‘People are trying to blame Vladimir…’ speech last month after the Moscow gas attack? Or his response to a question asking what these common values were exactly that he and Putin were said to share: ‘Vladimir loves his daughters. That’s a common value.’

So what’s that friendship about? We all wonder.

Could it be oil? As Bush encourages American oil companies to invest in Putin’s homeland, the leading Russian oil companies agreed last Wednesday to build a pipeline to a new ‘oil-export terminal’ in Murmansk, the Arctic deep-water port. A 1,550 mile connection to existing pipeline networks will allow Russian oil exports to the US to be profitable. They are seeking a 13% share of US oil imports by 2007: 1.6 million barrels a day.

The US, of course, would in that event be much less reliant on Middle Eastern oil exports – the stated aim of a nation having a few problems in that region. Russia is the world’s second largest supplier of oil, after Saudi Arabia, and before – you guessed it – Venezuela.

Now, to get rid of Hugo Chavez…

Source: MNSBC News

Vladimir’s vodka

And speaking of Russian energy providers, a strange story emerged this week surrounding the Russian leader and his (ab)use of vodka.

In what for a minute sounded like a throwback to the Yeltsin era, reports described how a Russian microbiologist had gone to India ahead of President Putin’s visit, to disinfect the cutlery that will be used by Vladimir and his wife Lyudmila.

The disinfectant of choice was, naturally, vodka.

Sonia Bakshi, a public affairs manager at the Maurya Sheraton hotel in Delhi described how ‘all his plates, knives and forks were washed with vodka and then dried with towels.’

Putin is a well-known fitness addict. The BBC reports that ‘there were strict orders from the Russian authorities that there should be no salads or cut fruits and even no cream in Mr Putin’s food.’ But vodka? The Diary had no idea that the national disinfectant was so good for you.

Defective defection

The world thought it was an exciting defection. But it turned out to be a medical condition.

...not a double agent after all, then

When dismissed Belarus ambassador to Tokyo, Pyotr Kravchenko, failed to return home this week, speculation mounted that the opponent of Europe’s ‘last dictator’, Alexander Lukashenko, had defected.

Kravchenko was relieved of his diplomatic duties on 19 November. The former leader of the opposition in Belarus, and possible future presidential candidate, he supported a rival candidate to Lukashenko in the 1994 Belarusian elections. With an enemy like that, defection seems like a good idea. Other opposition leaders to Lukashenko have ‘disappeared’ over the last few years.

Over the weekend, Kravchenko was nowhere to be found. The Belarus Foreign Ministry announced that he had disappeared – and not on their orders. What’s worse, they said, he had taken the official embassy stamp and keys.

Then, a sighting. The Japanese media reported that Kravchenko was witnessed entering the US embassy compound. It was just like the cold war all over again.

But Kravchenko reappeared on Tuesday, claiming he had been in his apartment all weekend, packing for the journey home. ‘I have high blood pressure,’ he said, ‘and I switched off all the telephones.’

Perhaps he failed the defection medical…

Quotes of the week

‘The same commitments.’
Those things shared by Henry Kissinger and George W. Bush, according to the latter. Kissinger has been appointed to head an independent commission to investigate the 11 September attacks.

‘What has happened in these two years, as we see it now, is a complete destruction of everything we built … If we do a calculation, we will see that without any doubt what we lost was big and what we gained was small.’
Mahmoud Abbas, top deputy of Yasser Arafat, reflecting on the intifada.

‘He’s a man of huge political sophistication. I can’t believe it was a slip of the tongue.’
Chris Pattern, EU Commissioner for Foreign Relations, on Giscard d’Estaing’s remarks opposing Turkish membership of the EU.

‘It’s “let’s bash the Saudis” time – we are guilty before we say anything.’
Adel-al-Jubeir, Saudi foreign affairs adviser, on anti-Saudi mood in the US.

‘We want all Malaysians to participate in the campaign to say no to Coke.’
Nadzim Johan, executive secretary of the Muslim Consumer Association of Malaysia (MCAM), which has organised a boycott of Coca-Cola in protest against US interference in Muslim affairs.