The five countries surrounding the Caspian Sea plan to sign an offshore environment accord in November at a meeting in Tehran, Iran\'s deputy minister of foreign affairs Mehdi Safari said Thursday. Safari was speaking at the close of the latest round of negotiations of a new convention for the Caspian Sea attended by deputy ministers from Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Iran. The environmental agreement will form part of the general convention which will also cover, offshore boundaries, resource management, fishing, shipping and security in the Caspian Sea. The legal status of the Caspian Sea has been uncertain since 1991 when the Soviet Union fell apart and a series of new, independent republics sprung up on the coast of the oil-rich area. Until then the Caspian was owned and managed by just two countries, the USSR and Iran. In the absense of a general consensus on how to divide up the Caspian, individual states have been signing bilateral and trilateral boundary agreements using median lines to create sovereign sectors offshore Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. (Platts Commodity News)