The One Percent Myth: Debunking a Diamond Industry Statistic
With the holiday shopping season now underway, many jewelry consumers are learning about conflict diamonds for the first time. We encourage our customers to read the Conflict Diamond Issues section on our web site and to seek out information from other sources as well. But we offer a word of advice: not all the information that’s publicly available is reliable.
In particular, we’d like to call attention to one highly inaccurate statistic: a statistic that has long been promoted by the World Diamond Council (WDC), an organization representing the global diamond industry. According to www.diamondfacts.org, a site maintained by the group, the percentage of conflict diamonds in the world diamond supply is “considerably less than 1%.” The WDC attributes this low percentage to the success of the Kimberley Process, the international diamond certification scheme it helped to found. “Today 74 governments have enshrined into their national law the Kimberley Process Certification System, and now more than 99% of the world’s diamonds are from conflict free sources,” states the web site.
Based only on this statistic, it sounds as if conflict diamonds are a very small problem indeed – as if the flow of conflict diamonds has been reduced to a trickle. Is this true? Regrettably, it isn’t. The notion that conflict diamonds make up considerably less than 1% of the diamond supply is really quite misleading – so misleading, that we’ll call it the 1% myth.
To explain the 1% myth, we’ll need to address this issue in a series of blogs. Today, let’s first take a look at how the diamond industry arrives at its own statistic.
The diamond industry defines “conflict diamond” as the Kimberley Process does – in the narrowest of terms. Under the Kimberley Process, the only diamonds that count as conflict diamonds are those used by a rebel group to finance a civil war against a legitimate government. Based on this definition, the Kimberley Process has determined that just one country produces conflict diamonds: Côte d’Ivoire, a small country in West Africa with an ongoing civil conflict.
If you take at face value that the only conflict diamonds that exist are diamonds from Côte d’Ivoire, then the calculation would go something like this. Every year, rebels in Côte d’Ivoire smuggle about $20 million in diamonds into neighboring countries. In 2010, the global diamond industry produced about $11.4 billion in diamonds. Divide $20 million by $11.4 billion and you get a very small percentage – about 0.2%. This is what the diamond industry means when it states that “considerably less than 1%” of diamonds are conflict diamonds. (Indeed, the WDC cites a statistic finding that 99.8% of diamonds are conflict free.)
But is it truly the case that only 0.2% of diamonds are conflict diamonds? It can’t be. That’s because excluded from this calculation are billions of dollars worth of diamonds tied to extreme violence – including torture, rape, and killings. In our next blog, we’ll take a closer look at what the diamond industry leaves out, and how bad the problem of conflict diamonds really is.
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World Diamond Council Says: December 1st, 2011 at 7:49 amDEBUNKING THE WORLD DIAMOND COUNCIL’S DEBUNKERS
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.