Diamonds

How to commemorate a blissful moment like an anniversary or an engagement – the answer is easy, buy a diamond. How naïve are we regarding what’s happening around the world? But do we really need to care before we buy a luxury item like diamond? Didn’t Darwin say that it is the survival of the fittest? Didn’t we read about John Galt in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”?

It is very easy to be philosophical at times, but the reality is quite different. We all are hypocritical – How can we survive in this world if we have to think every time before we indulge in any luxury?

But we do have the responsibility – the responsibility towards mankind and justice…

“ALTHOUGH these lively histories share a villain—De Beers, the dark manipulator of the diamond trade—their indictments lack conviction. Neither author is able to persuade himself, let alone his readers, that the cartel is so very bad. By contrast their heroes really are heroic. For Kevin Krajick the good guys are the prospectors; for Matthew Hart they are the diamond cutters too.

Since the late 19th century, when De Beers came under the control of Cecil Rhodes, it has dominated the diamond market. It sells about $5 billion-worth of rough diamonds a year, closely adjusting supply to demand.

American trustbusters and crime watchers have at various times concluded that this constituted anti-competitive behavior. But who really has an interest in cutting diamond prices by breaking up the cartel? As dealers in Antwerp and Tel Aviv will admit, the diamond business rests on two supports: greed and vanity. Few of those in the trade, and none of the estimated 85% of American women who own at least one piece of diamond jewelry, want to see them cheapened. As that wise song has it:

He's your guy when stocks are high, but beware when they start to descend. That's when those louses go back to their spouses. Diamonds are a girl's best friend.

The De Beers cartel is also the world's best hope of crippling the trade in so-called blood diamonds—the diamonds that promote and prolong the wars in Sierra Leone, Angola and elsewhere in Africa. It alone has the market muscle, through its purchases and through identification marks, to bring diamonds to market with reliable guarantees of origin.”

- Endless Quest, Oct 18th 2001, The Economist