They produce caviar in Madagascar

It is one of the ingredients of holiday meals. Three French people produce caviar in Madagascar. And with Christmas and New Year’s Day, they’re not idle!

Seen from the sky, there are around thirty large circles placed on an immense lake of 2000 hectares on the heights of Madagascar. It is inside these large reservoirs that the French have been breeding sturgeon for years, whose eggs will be sent around the world in the form of caviar.

“The two big export centers are Europe and the United States, comments Christophe Davezies, one of the partners, but also Japan. We have many more demands than we are able to offer. There, at the end of the year, we have around 56 tonnes that we will not use.”

Madagascar breeding is one of the few located in the southern hemisphere. For the French, the spot is ideal: “We pay very close attention to the stress of the fish. It is a little more difficult to work with than on some farms we visited because we are on large volumes of water.”

A quality environment

If this exceptional product is expensive, between 900 and 3,500 euros per kilo, it is because it takes time to obtain it. Allow two to five years of minimum breeding, or even 20 years for belugas, to ultimately obtain 10 to 15% of the weight of the fish, only in caviar.

Malagasy people are entitled to a special rate: “We have a sales price sponsored by caviar, which already allows all the communities around the farm to have access to it, at a price which is excessively low.”

Upon their arrival, the French first had to be adopted by the local population: “We tried to get the communities involved, for example, by financing swimming lessons on the lake, because people don’t know how to swim on the highlands.”

Because because of the fragility of sturgeon eggs, everything is manual here, from production to packaging. The farm’s objective is to reach cruising speed with a production of 20 tonnes per year of caviar, in 2030.

Go further

Find this column on the site, the app and in the international mobility magazine “Français à l’enseignement.fr”