Diamond Flaws

President Obama will visit one kind of diamond, when he takes in a baseball game in Cuba this week.* And June brides have a many-faceted diamond on their ring fingers. For the independent miners paying the violent armed groups who control access to the rivers in the Central African Republic (CAR), the diamonds they find represent a treacherous way to scrape out a living.

     These miners are far removed from those who wear the diamonds and gold found in the CAR, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Angola, and Mexico and the precious stones from Afghanistan and Myanmar (Burma) and from those who rely on the mobile phones, cars, computers, and other products that contain tungsten from Colombia and tantalum, tungsten, and cobalt from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Before these raw materials become part of finished products, they change hands often in secretive and poorly regulated supply chains that span the globe.

     The UN, OECD, US, and EU all are taking measures to pressure companies to ask their mineral suppliers more questions and to notice warning signs. Berne Declaration, a Swiss non-governmental organization (NGO), knew Togo produced little or no gold, yet Swiss companies thought they were buying gold that originated there. Instead, their gold was coming from Burkina Faso. True to its advertising, De Beers is assuring consumers "a diamond is forever" by launching a pilot program to buy diamond jewelry and loose diamonds for resale, thereby reducing the need to buy new diamonds from unknown sources.

     Not only is there growing concern about the human rights abuses associated with the dangers independent miners face, but conflict in the world's poorest countries relies in part on financing from selling licenses to miners, collecting tolls on transportation routes to the mines, taxes, and mineral sales. In Zimbabwe, even the national security forces and secret police supplement their government budgets and escape government oversight by engaging in the mineral trade.

     There are money and jobs enough in the mineral trade for both miners and manufacturers to benefit by behaving responsibly.

*See the earlier post, "Good News from Cuba," for background on President Obama's trip to Cuba.