I’ve been shopping around, looking at diamonds, for a couple of months now. Although I’ve been fairly set at my decision to shop at Brilliant Earth for quite some time, I have been tempted to choose from a few other websites due to the fact that they also provide “conflict free” diamonds. I felt that there was something amiss with the term, but it makes me feel a lot better to know what that is.

Thanks!!

The Brilliant Earth Blog attacks a statistic presented by the World Diamond Council, which is that considerably less than 1 percent of the rough diamonds traded today can be qualified as conflict diamonds. Such assaults on the reputation and motives of the diamond industry have become standard fair at the start of any shopping season, and frequently one may surmise that they are meant to serve the specific interests of the organization that is carrying them out. For its part Brilliant Earth is a jewelry retailer selling items including diamonds that it ensures its customers are “conflict free,” because they are sourced in Canada.

On its blog, Brilliant Earth criticizes the diamond industry for defining conflict diamonds “in the narrowest of terms,” because it says the industry insists that they only include merchandise that is “used by a rebel group to finance a civil war against a legitimate government.” For the record, this definition was devised by governments and endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly, which in its resolution calling for an end to the trade in conflict diamonds in January 2011 defined them as “rough diamonds which are used by rebel movements to finance their military activities, including attempts to undermine or overthrow legitimate governments.”

The World Diamond Council stands by its statement that only a small fraction of 1 percent of the rough diamonds sold today can be qualified as conflict diamonds. But at the same time the WDC does not contend that perfect conditions exist in all the countries and regions in which rough diamonds are mined. Violence and oppression certainly do occur, but rarely are they the only problems that ordinary people need to cope with. So are poverty, hunger, a lack of access to proper health care and education, insufficient housing, poor infrastructure, a shortage of jobs and minimal economic opportunity.

Brilliant Earth assures its customers that its diamonds are “conflict free” because they are exclusively Canadian. The jewelry retailer also states on its website that “5 percent of its profits are donated to Africa.” That is commendable, but for the millions of Africans, who depend on the diamond industry for their livelihood, it will be regarded merely as compensation for the possible consequence of Brilliant Earth’s implied boycott of the diamonds they mine.

The position of the World Diamond Council, is that while we have to work tirelessly to improve the human rights situation in the areas that diamonds are produced, at the same time we need to ensure that the revenues generated by diamond mining and processing serve to bring about positive economic development and social change. African success stories, like Botswana and Namibia, are good proof of this approach. Their situations would have been greatly different should the entire jewelry industry have followed Brilliant Earth’s exclusionary diamond acquisition strategy.

That is not to say that we should tolerate violence and oppression. As was most recently demonstrated concerning diamond from the Marange region of Zimbabwe, the World Diamond Council, through its involvement in the Kimberley Process, did not limit its attention only on goods sourced in regions caught up in a civil war. Even though there was no civil war in Zimbabwe the WDC pushed successfully for a halt to exports until the situation changed on the ground.

The recently concluded Kinshasa agreement, which the WDC supports, allows for the export of diamonds from three mines in the Marange region which are judged to meet Kimberley Process standards. There have been critics of the agreement, but it is worth noting that, after years of international boycotts and sanctions, the KP is the only organization that managed to address both human rights violations directly in Zimbabwe and also affect the way in which its government behaves.

We would suggest that, if there is a myth, it is the one of the industry’s alleged indifference to the plight of the people of Africa.