Write a one page paper on Africa\'s \"dirty diamonds\". Your paper should explai

Question

Write a one page paper on Africa's "dirty diamonds". Your paper should explain what they are and what troubles they have brought to this region. It should also explain what has/is being done to deal with the problem including the Kimberley Process. Include references. Page 423 will help.

9.4 Economic Geography 423 Problem Landscape Cleaning Up the Dirty Diamonds "Diamonds are a girl's best friend," sang Marilyn plan, called the Kimberley Process, designed $14 million worth of diamonds from Angolan Monroe. Diamonds Are Forever proclaimed the title of a James Bond Film. Another film did not have such an endearing name: Blood Diamond. This film tells part of a sordid story about diamonds:as recently as 2004, as much gin and contents. The importing countries nitiative. In the name of Africa's welfare, but as 15 percent of the world's annual production (the biggest of which are China and India) of rough diamonds was made up of dirty diamonds (also called "conflict diamonds" and unopened, and reject any shipments that do blood diamonds), defined by the United Nations not meet the requirements. Only countries that areas. Other diamond companies followed suit, as rough diamonds used by rebel movements subscribe to the Kimberley Process are allowed especially in an effort to please Americans, who or their allies to finance conflict aimed at undermining legitimate governments."Gems of such questionable origin financed at least three have cleaned up the diamond trade. Diamond African mining productsconflict metals or African wars. But diplomatic, nongovernmental, certifcion has been spearheaded by the and business efforts have largely stemmed the world's leading diamond company (with about And outside the mining sector, there have been tide of Africa's dirty diamonds. to ensure that only legally mined rough dia- monds, untainted by violence, reach the market. lations debacle could lead to a business disaster Rough diamonds must be sent in tamper-proof as happened with an organized boycott against containers with a certificate guaranteeing their fur products in the 1980s, De Beers seized the rebels in a single year. Perceiving that a public re- certainly also as a means of increasing demand and profit, De Beers introduced branded dia monds, certified as coming from nonconflict must certify that the shipments have arrived to trade in rough diamonds buy 40 percent of the world's diamonds. Corporate interests and consumer ethics Diamonds are not the only potentially "dirty conflict minerals are discussed on page 439. efforts to certify a legal trade in stockpiled and In 2002, following four years of negotiations, 45 countries endorsed a UN-backed certification two-thirds of the market), the South African- based multinational De Beers. De Beers was embarrassed by a report that it had bought confiscated ivory, but as we have seen, these have so far proved unsuccessful. Surging commodity prices of natural resources do not es and a high incidence of civil war.19 These deter investment and tablish a sustainable foundation for development. In fact, de he kind of economic diversification that ideally should include pendence on primary commodity exports is associated with three problems that sustain underdevelopment: economic shocks related to volatile commodity prices, poor governance, manufacturing and services. The tide of globalization that sweptthe world between about 1980 and 2000 changed the structure of developing country exports profoundly. In 1980, 75 percent of LDC exports were primary commodities, but by 2000, 80 percent were maniu factured goods. LDCs generally broke loose of their dependence on primary commodities-but not the African countries. Sub Saharan Africa has been the last world region to be part of this transformation, and we need to see whether African countries can succeed in joining the global market for manufactures or se cure a footing with profitable service sectors. Economist Paul Collier did a statistical analysis of the rela tionship between primary com modity dependence and the risk of civil war. He found that in any given five-year period, countries not dependent upon primary commodity exports had only a 1 percent risk of civil war, whereas Figure 9.19 The Kiambethu tea farm is just 20 miles from Nairobi in Kenya's beautiful highland country Kenya's economy is highly dependent on exports of tea and coffee. Over-reliance on cash crops and other raw materials makes many Sub-Saharan African countries vulnerable to price swings in the global economy.

Explanation / Answer

Diamonds don’t kill people. Yet, the record indicates that diamonds have helped
sustain armed conflicts that, in Africa, have killed almost one million people in just
over a decade. In Angola, the UNITA rebels – led by Jonas Savimbi until his death
in a shoot-out with government troops in February 2002 – controlled at various
times as much as seventy per cent of the country’s diamond production. In Sierra
Leone, diamonds have helped finance the RUF rebels, sustaining a civil war that
has lasted for a decade, reducing Sierra Leone to the rank of “least developed na-
tion” in the UN index, with a population whose average life expectancy is 25.9 years.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo – rich in diamonds, other minerals and tim-
ber – the International Rescue Committee estimates that over 2.3 million people
have died since 1998 from the effects of the war on food security and health; an-
other 330,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the war itself. In the proc-
ess, the legitimacy of an otherwise legal and profitable industry has been challenged
as never before.The need for a global certification system had become apparent to a number of other
countries. As a result, multilateral negotiations, called the Kimberley process, grap-
pled with the issue of how to ensure greater probity in an unregulated industry, and
how to end the phenomenon of conflict diamonds.
The Kimberley Process began in May 2000 at the instigation of the Government
of South Africa. South Africa, Botswana and Namibia viewed the growing public-
ity on conflict diamonds with as much alarm as the diamond industry. Damage to
the industry would be reflected in damage to jobs in these countries and to their
economies as a whole. The first meeting was inconclusive, but the second meeting,
held a month later in Luanda, fleshed out the basic principles required of an inter-
national certification system: strict controls in diamond producing, processing and
consuming countries, certificates of origin and legitimacy (the latter to be issued
by trading rather than producing countries), and the need for the industry to de-
velop a chain of warranties to reassure consumers..Diamonds did not cause the wars in Angola, Sierra Leone or the DRC. Diamonds
entered the story, in all three cases, after the conflict had begun. Grievance, howev-
er well or badly justified, was the motivator, and power was the goal. But diamonds
became important to the funding, continuation, and depth of all three wars, and
in the cases of Sierra Leone and Angola, they became essential. There are two parts
to the idea of “essential”. The first is that by obtaining diamonds, combatants can
pay for weapons, enrich themselves, and so on. The second is that by controlling
the diamond areas, they can also deprive their opponents of revenues that might
help it to prosecute the war.
In Sierra Leone, the mix of rebel motivations at the war’s outset had been trans-
formed by the mid-1990s into a fixation on holding the diamond fields at all costs.
Mentored by Charles Taylor, who had paid for much of his own Liberian rebellion
through timber exports, the RUF leadership learned through ten years of war that
power flows from access to resources, and with power, further resources become
available. The RUF – apolitical, non-ethnic, and without territorial pretensions –
was a new kind of rebel movement: “non-ideological, non-Clausewitzian, and non
revolutionary”, as one writer puts it.

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