Clean labs for a dirty business

It seems the mining industry rarely makes the daily papers unless something gives it a black eye. Witness the coverage “conflict diamonds” has been receiving in the mainstream press, and the political interest that goes along with it. But while the industry is often portrayed in a less-than-positive light, its reaction to the issue has been both consistent and upright.

It is in the industry’s interest to clean up a situation that threatens to discredit it profoundly and possibly result in a public boycott. It does not need to lose diamond production to forces that recover diamonds not on grease- tables but at the point of a rifle. Most of all, the industry has ethical reasons for acting vigorously to choke the conflict-diamond trade.

Arguably, the rival armies in Sierra Leone and Angola will always find a way to finance their campaigns, and bottling up the diamond trade may have the effect simply of sending them to other sources of money. We agree that eliminating conflict diamonds will not solve the problems of tribal and factional fighting in post-colonial Africa, but we also believe there is ground to be gained in making the diamond trade too much of a nuisance for warlords to bother with. The industry is right to try and find ways to do that, all the while remembering that murder and mutilation are matters of some importance, diamonds or no diamonds.

Some maintain that the civilized West’s unwillingness to spend blood and treasure in destroying the world’s terrorists and warlords forces it to make deals instead and that the West is more interested in conciliating and appeasing than it is in resisting and deterring the violence of monster states and terrorist organizations. In the best of all possible worlds, the West would be braver and nastier, the Foday Sankohs of the world would be timid or dead, and conflict diamonds wouldn’t exist. But the fact is they do exist, and we believe strangling their trade is necessary.

But one way it won’t be done is on trust. A member of the House of Representatives in the United States has proposed legislation under which diamonds sold in the U.S. would bear a certificate of origin, establishing that they are not from an area where diamonds are being used to finance mass killings. The United Nations has suggested similar guidelines for the industry. This is nice but naive. The notion that a trader in conflict diamonds — one who has already shown he isn’t above dealing with murderers — would shudder at the thought of using a forged certificate is laughable.

The other issue is criminal involvement in the diamond trade. All the major diamond-producing countries have found that organized crime eagerly moves in on diamond production. Mobs love diamonds for being a high-value material, easily hidden and transported. Their origins are easily masked by cutting and polishing, and their little diamond tracks can be efficiently covered by dispersing the shipment in smaller packets. Diamonds make a fine — and generally untraceable — medium of exchange, and short of infiltrating smuggling rings, or finding someone frightened or brave enough to rat, the world’s police forces have few ways to crack these cases.

Providing liquidity for criminal dealings is socially undesirable in itself, but the industry loses, too, through what is euphemistically described as “leakage.” Having two or three pours a year stolen from a gold mine, or a truck or two of zinc concentrate diverted every week, would make most mine managers blanch. Yet the diamond industry, by its very nature, has to put up with comparable losses on a regular basis.

The persistence of “conflict” diamonds and criminal diamond traffic is why developing research on the trace-element composition of diamonds is such an attractive prospect. In a recent article in Mining Journal, the experienced diamond geologist Bram Jansze discusses the progress being made on that front and comes to the sobering conclusion that the most promising methods of typing diamonds are still in their infancy.

Janse points out that the most basic need in developing typing methods is for a representative collection of diamonds from around the world. Such a collection would be the only basis for assembling the massive information bank that diamond typing would require — a sort of “world atlas” of diamond compositions. A collection on this scale does not yet exist, and it might be harder to assemble than many people seem to think.

To develop the techniques and procedures for diamond typing is conceptually simple: most of the thinking centres on using spectrographic techniques to identify trace elements in the diamond. Turning the conceptually simple into the practical and replicable is another story, and it will take time (measured in years) and money (measured in millions) to bring that technology into the industry. Consider that trace-element “fingerprints” of gold — long in development, and designed to help with security in the gold business — are coming into use only now, and you have some idea of how long it takes to put a technically sound idea into practice.

The best time to start work on a worldwide database and refining spectrographic techniques was years ago. The second-best time is now.