In the recent years, monumental controversy raged around the issue of conflict diamonds, commonly known as 'blood diamonds'.
So what are they? And how did they cause such a tremendous uproar?
In essence, blood diamonds were mined within non-democratic countries that were using the profits to buy weapons and arms to fund their conflict against their own people, or their neighbours.
Once this revelation came to the general publics attention, confidence was lost in the diamond industry, resulting in it being left with one major problem, which they knew they had to tackle quickly as such an industry relied solely on it's quality and good reputation.
Famous retailers such as the world renowned ‘Tiffany’ based in New York, demanded action. Fortunately, the diamond trade is dominated by one company, the South African based ‘DeBeers’ who manage the control, supply and price of world diamonds. It was DeBeers in conjunction with the United Nations who formulated the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), an international cooperative monitoring system designed to eradicate the flow of conflict diamonds. It works on the principle of attaching a KPCS certificate to a diamond shipment; which states that the rough diamonds leaving a country must be in a tamper-proof container, and all contents must be correctly numbered and identified. A government certified certificate must also be included in shipment for ultimate security.
As a result of the Kimberly Process, the trading in conflict diamonds has dramatically reduced to just 1%, of the total diamond outlay. The remaining percentage can be traced to small areas in the Republic of Congo, Liberia, and the Ivory Coast, as well as some concerns surrounding areas in South America.
Overall, the Kimberly Process has massively helped rid the world diamond trade of conflict diamonds. Despite the fact that it’s not completely erased, the world’s diamond traders have done a considerable amount of work in preventing a stain that would have threatened their extremely high reputation.
The KPCS can rightly be viewed as a success - with enough cooperation and a clear strategy, a seemingly insurmountable problem was tackled. This raises an interesting question in the wider area of Fair Trade - if enough will is present, could more problems be eradicated? It is clear that once the general public were aware of the horrendous issues surrounding diamond production, the diamond industry as a whole, knew they had to do something about it.
The trade of conflict diamonds was an extreme example relating to violence; it was that that inspired public opinion to turn on trade. With Fairtrade products such as coffee, the issues aren’t as extreme, although they are still matters of life and death, as they keep countries in poverty, just not in such a stark and violent manner.
So, next time, when you buy a jar of coffee, if you knew that the farmer was living below the poverty line, would you be prepared to pay an extra 10p?
