With a neatly trimmed mustache, blue shirt and slim appearance, Amanjai Ibatulo, a 70-year-old former sports teacher, lives in a large white house on the northern coast of the Caspian Sea, in the Atyrau region of Kazakhstan. Twenty years ago, the coast was 2 kilometers from his house, on the outskirts of the city of Zhanbay; It is now more than 20 kilometers away. The water is at the end of a sandy path that crosses a steppe that is as arid as it is monotonous. “The climate here is difficult, it rains very little and the wind blows constantly,” observes Amanjai Ibatulo.
Nostalgic for the Soviet Union, he remembers with emotion the time when unemployment did not exist and the sea was generous. He especially misses fishing trips with friends: “From the 1980s to the 2000s, we didn’t even need a boat because the fish were so abundant. We grabbed a volleyball net, walked around for a bit, and after half an hour, we returned with two or three sturgeons. »
Recognizable by its conical silhouette, the sturgeon is the symbol of Zhanbay. Statue, sits on a pedestal in the center of the city. The locals appreciate its meat with which they prepare fishbarmak, a variation of beshbarmak, the Kazakh national dish composed of noodles accompanied by potatoes, onions and in which the horse and lamb are replaced by fish. The largest sturgeon is called the European beluga (spindle spindle, due to its scientific name, not to be confused with the species of cetacean called beluga) and can reach 7 meters in length. The price of its caviar can reach several thousand euros per kilo. Amanjai Ibatulo proudly remembers his biggest catch: a 500-kilogram beluga. Since 2014, the former teacher no longer has the right to fish for sturgeon. “The fines are very high. We used to eat this fish all the time, we miss it.” laments Didar Yesmoukhanov, the placid mayor of Zhanbay.
A panel inside the town hall traces the history of the town founded in 1930, at the same time as a fishing kolkhoz that closed in the 1990s due to overfishing, poaching, pollution, but also the fall in sea level. , the six species of sturgeon. present in the Caspian are now in danger of extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
This decline mainly affects the north of this shallow inland sea shared by Russia and Kazakhstan. Basin where the two great rivers Volga and Ural flow, where sturgeons swim to spawn. In Zhanbay, the official fishing season lasts a few months, in spring and autumn, and now focuses on carp. But due to the low standard of living, many people continue to fish for sturgeon regardless.
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