The Border Service of the KNB prevented 32 cases of poaching in the Caspian Sea area in May this year.
According to the press service of the department, border guards confiscated 21 units of watercraft, more than 40 km of poaching nets, and 770 kg of sturgeon fish. The amount of prevented damage amounted to approximately 320 million tenge.
Overall in May, department employees detained 3,963 violators in the border zone, including 30 foreigners for border violations and 26 foreigners for attempted border violations.
Additionally, border guards prevented 1,443 cases of illegal movement across the state border, including:
- narcotic substances with a total weight of more than 5 kg;
- weapons and ammunition – 62 cases (1 blank-firing unit, 3 firearms, 1 traumatic weapon, 464 cold weapons, 93 rounds of ammunition, 23 stun guns);
- religious literature – 26 cases (135 copies);
- fuel and lubricants – 373 cases (more than 50,000 litres) to a total value of over 27 million tenge;
- consumer goods – 837 cases to a total value of over 2.8 billion tenge;
- currency – 133 cases to a total value of over 1.4 billion tenge.
Materials related to these cases have been sent to law enforcement and judicial bodies to hold the violators accountable.
It is worth recalling that the fight against poaching remains a pressing issue amid contradictory policies in the field of nature conservation.
At the end of May, the Ministry of Ecology announced an increase in the saiga antelope population to 5 million individuals (up from 2.8 million last year) and is preparing proposals for a ‘transition to sustainable use’ of the animals. In practice, this means a return to culling, which in 2023 led to uncontrolled killing of saiga and illegal trade in meat and horns.
A population increase of nearly 200% in one year raises doubts about the quality of official statistics — at such a rate, by 2026 there would be more saiga than people in Kazakhstan. It is worth noting that in February 2024, the same ministry planned to legalise the export of saiga horns by 2025.
The question is, how effective can the fight against illegal animal harvesting be, when the state itself is considering the possibility of mass culling? Read the detailed article on how the Ministry of Ecology is preparing to turn nature conservation into a business at this link.