RAPAPORT... South Africa needs to boost its lagging diamond industry to
re-establish the industry’s former glory, two keynote speakers said at the
nation’s first Diamond
Indaba in
Johannesburg.
Ernie Blom, president of the World Federation of Diamond Bourses,
lamented the state of the South African diamond business and called on
delegates at the conference to “work together as partners or we will all perish
together as failures.”
“Unfortunately, we are faced today with a great irony that the once
mighty South Africa diamond industry is something of a lame duck,” Blom said in
his Indaba speech that was posted online by
Mining Weekly October 28.
The event was also a forum for the launch of the South African Young
Diamond Beneficiators' Guild, which aims to help startups led mainly by black
entrepreneurs to cut and polish diamonds, Reuters said in a separate report October 27
“Although
the concept of beneficiation
of African rough diamonds [the push to grow the cutting and polishing sector
among previously disadvantaged South Africans] was started in this country in
the early 1930s, we find ourselves struggling to find an economic model that
can justify diamond cutting and polishing at home,” Blom pointed out. “We must
find ways of rejuvenating the business.”
Even
though South Africa is the world’s fifth-largest diamond producer and home to
some of the diamond mining industry’s most iconic names, the number of workers
employed in the sector in South Africa had fallen from a peak of 4,500 to 200
today, Blom said.
“We have a number of producer countries such as Namibia, Botswana,
Angola, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania within close proximity with similar aspirations
regard beneficiation,” Barend Petersen, the executive chairperson at De Beers Consolidated Mines, told delegates at the
Indaba, an African term for a conference, in a speech posted by Mining Weekly.
“We need to consider the
benefits that we can derive as a region and individual countries if we
collaborate to establish SADC as a diamond beneficiation hub," he added.
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