Caviar Portugal

Paulo Pedro first got interested when, by total chance, he met a man with an Eastern European accent in his analysis laboratory on the Algarve’s Gambelas university campus. The man had an unusual idea in mind.

He was Ukrainian Valery Afilov, who had worked for 12 years farming sturgeon in the former Soviet Union. He’d got to the stage where he’d rented out a 15-hectare dam, with a business partner, for 49 years – and although he later emigrated to Portugal, he never forgot the potential of the deal he’d left behind.

But the plan to farm sturgeon (the fish whose roe is made into caviar) only began gathering force with the arrival on the scene of Jorge Pereira, a businessman with lots of connections in gourmet food distribution.

Together, the men drew up a project that won the special prize of the “Economia do Mar” competition, entitled «Ideias em Caixa 2010» - an initiative designed to stimulate pioneering business projects, promoted by the University of the Algarve. The caviar plan was officially awarded on 24th March.

“Right now we’ve already got some people interested. We’ll need an investment of around a million and a half euros to produce between 600 and 700 kilos of caviar per year”, Paulo Pedro reveals. And the price per kilo for this delicacy will vary between 1500 and 5000 euros… There’s already an international market on the waiting list for the Algarve’s upcoming production.

In principal, full production should be possible within seven years. “And we’re estimating that by the end of the fourth year, we’ll be able to start selling national caviar”, he adds.

In Russia where the waters are much colder and the winters horrendously cold, sturgeon can take up to 20 years to reach sexual maturity (and start producing their valuable roe). “Strange as it may seem, the Algarve affords perfect conditions for the maximum growth of this species of fish” in a much shorter period of time, says the biologist.

As to name, the plan is to baptize the business “caviar Portugal”, or “caviar Algarve”, written in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet. Meantime, its promoters are looking for the ideal location to raise their sturgeon. They need a closed space, with roughly 1600 square metres of covered area – possibly a kind of warehouse, where fresh water tanks can be erected.

“The biggest problem is that we’re talking of systems that have to be continually adapted”. In other forms of aquaculture, for example species like golden bass and sea bass, the fish grow to a certain dimension, and are then fished.

“Here, we’re talking about a species that will rapidly gain weight and volume”, he explains. “It’s difficult to calculate the number of fish, but the whole infrastructure should produce between 40 and 60 tons of sturgeon biomass”. Won’t that many fish cause pollution? The biologist concedes the point but says there are plans for treating residual waters and making use of the “resulting silt and mud” “rich in organic material for agriculture”.

In an extremely bureaucratic, centralised country, the business partners are also concerned with licensing issues. Very soon Paulo Pedro will be having meetings in Lisbon with the ICNB (Institute for the Conservation of Nature and Biodiversity). “There could be problems over the importation of juveniles (young fish). First, it’s an exotic species, and secondly, it’s protected”.

CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), the international regulatory authority for threatened species, has already banned the commerce of natural caviar in a bid to halt over-fishing of sturgeon in areas like the Caspian Sea – a hot spot for illegal fishing and contraband.

Here in the Algarve, the new project will be based on four different sturgeon species: Beluga (Huso huso), Russian (Acipenser gueldenstaedtii), Siberian (Acipenser baerii) and Sterlet (Acipenser ruthenus). “At the moment there are two techniques for the extraction of caviar. The traditional one, which implies the death of the female, or the modern alternative involving microsurgery. We can use both options in the future”, explains Valery.

And beyond the luxury of caviar, the idea is also to produce sturgeon meat. Although the principal objective here would be exportation, luxury restaurants and hotels in the Algarve could benefit from the proximity of such production. The idea is that gourmet chefs could call up and place their orders, and within a short space of time, they’d receive delivery of super fresh, recently extracted caviar.

But isn’t this a risky investment in such times of economic turbulence? “I honestly think that the only things that sell well during crises are luxury products” smiles Paulo Pedro wryly. Valery adds: “in Russia during the crisis the number of billionaires doubled. What more can I say?”

Right now, Valery is working as a bricklayer on building sites – but whenever he gets the chance, he boots up his laptop and spends hours researching the latest progress in what has become his passion. “It’s a form of illness”, he smiles. “I get up in the mornings and go to bed at night thinking about sturgeon! Science doesn’t stop. There are always advances. They’re already producing hybrid species, for example,” he tells.

“We’d like to set up a study centre for sturgeon in Portugal”, he adds, unable to hide his enthusiasm. “There’s a lot of scientific interest in what’s generally considered to be the dinosaur among fish”, confirms Paulo Pedro.

Meantime, on 13th April, CCMAR (the Centre for Sciences of the Sea) will be holding a talk on new advances in the study of a protein discovered in sturgeon that could have biomedical uses in the area of human blood vessels.

Another long-term ambition is “repopulating” the sea with Atlantic sturgeon (Acinpenser sturio) in areas where it used to exist – for example the Guadiana River (the last refuge of this species that effectively disappeared during the 80s). But that’s not all. Sturgeon cartilage is used by the pharmaceutical industry for the creation of beauty products, including anti-ageing face creams. Even the fish’s skin is used in “the absolute must-haves” among female accessories…