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UAE to farm its own caviar in venture with German company
In the comic novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a western fish expert teams up with a businessman to bring salmon fishing to the mountains of the south-western Arabian peninsula.
- By Simeon Kerr, Financial Times
- Published: 23:29 July 11, 2008
- The Abu Dhabi initiative aims to provide a lucrative export opportunity for the UAE, while also helping safeguard the future of the sturgeon.
- Image Credit: Bloomberg News
In the comic novel Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, a western fish expert teams up with a businessman to bring salmon fishing to the mountains of the south-western Arabian peninsula.
On the other side of Arabia, life is not quite imitating art - but a UAE-German joint venture is building a vast sturgeon fish farm in Abu Dhabi.
While the novel's madcap idea ended in disaster, the Abu Dhabi initiative aims to provide a lucrative export opportunity for the UAE as it seeks to diversify away from oil production, while also helping safeguard the future of the endangered species.
Bin Salem Group and United Food Technologies, its German partner, are investing $80 million in the project, centred around a climate-controlled facility in an industrial park on the outskirts of the capital. Here 64 swimming-pool-sized basins will house thousands of sturgeon, ultimately providing up to 40 tonnes a year of caviar and 710 tonnes of smoked and sliced sturgeon meat.
Work has started on the farm, the world's largest single-site plant, which should take 14 months to build. The joint venture, which has not yet been named, will take two years from the start of operations to bring fish to the maturity needed to produce the high-grade Ossetra caviar. The Ossetra sturgeon is smaller than the famous Beluga and it is said to produce a more intense, nuttier-tasting roe. A 100-gram tin of Ossetra sells for £250 in London.
"We are not compromising on taste. It's the same as wild caviar," says Ahmad Al Daheri, Bin Salem's chief executive.
Initial stock of 146,000 Siberian fingerlings (young fish in their first or second year) currently being reared by UFT in Germany will be complemented by 86,000 more at a later stage as the project builds up enough stock to produce farmed caviar for its European customers. Thereafter breeding is planned to replenish the stock, allowing the plant to become self-sustaining.
Five years in the making, Bin Salem Group forged ahead with the project when the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, known as Cites, limited the export of Caspian Sea sturgeon, squeezing the market for the prized delicacy.
Opportunity
"We saw the gap between supply and demand and then the UN resolution created a great opportunity for a new industry - caviar farming," says Michel Nassour, Bin Salem's financial adviser.
Bin Salem Group says the project will abide by international regulatory standards, avoiding the "inhumane" practice of harvesting caviar and then stitching up the fish in the hope that it will produce another batch.
"The quality of this technique is less and we believe it is against animal rights - we don't want to go near that," says Nassour.
Instead, as the fish reach maturity the pools' temperature is lowered until the fish become "sleepy", at which point the caviar is cut out. The rest of the fish is harvested as smoked and sliced sturgeon fillet, which, unlike caviar, is rarely found on Gulf menus.
The joint venture is already considering a second facility in the UAE. It has also received interest from a Malaysian company in the German-pioneered technology being used at the Abu Dhabi farm.
The initiative differs from the average development at the Industrial City of Abu Dhabi, and will certainly have more interesting by-products than the heavy industry surrounding the facility.
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