IV.

Economy

The Caspian Sea contains highly productive fisheries, yielding valuable catches of sturgeon, salmon, perch, herring, and carp. The sturgeon catch supplies up to 90 per cent of the world’s caviar. In the 1990s, consortia of oil companies began to prospect for oil in the Caspian Sea in the expectation of oil deposits comparable to those discovered in the North Sea. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, in particular, received rapidly increasing levels of foreign investment in their oil and gas sectors. The legal status of the Caspian Sea has been a matter of dispute between the countries bordering it since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In October 2000 Russia and Kazakhstan, the two largest of these countries, signed an agreement defining their areas of sovereignty and their rights to exploit the lake’s natural resources, especially fisheries and oil deposits. A major oil pipeline linking the Caspian Sea with the world market opened in March 2001, connecting the Tengiz oil field in western Kazakhstan with Novorossiysk, a Russian port on the Black Sea. In June 2002 construction began on a pipeline linking the Azerbaijani port of Baku with the city of Ceyhan, Turkey. The pipeline, which began operating in 2005, has the capacity of exporting up to 1 million barrels of oil per day. In addition, several smaller regional oil pipelines are in operation and the construction of a number of gas pipelines has also been proposed.