Digging to Riches

Usually, diamond mining is noisy, dirty work, full of heavy machinery and complicated equipment. Diamonds don’t like to give themselves up too easily and are often found buried deep within the ground. When we think of mining, it is easy to visualize big holes, deep tracks rutted into the ground and vast piles of dirt that have been unearthed in search of hidden treasures.

This type of mining accounts for about 76 percent of the world’s diamond mining industry, but another sort of mining also exists – alluvial mining, which makes up the balance. Alluvial diamonds are those that have been unearthed from their primary source (Kimberlite) by millions of years of natural erosion and have found their way to river beds, the ocean floor or a shoreline.

The problem with this type of mining is that all too often the vast geographical areas over which most alluvial diamond deposits are spread cannot be easily isolated and so do not lend themselves to industrial mining. While alluvial deposits are found on the Atlantic coast of South Africa and Namibia, as well as in some riverbeds in Angola, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Central African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Guinea, Ghana, Liberia, Tanzania, Togo, Brazil, Venezuela, Guyana and South Africa, formal alluvial mining occurs mainly in Angola, Namibia and South Africa. Around 10 percent of diamonds are acquired by formal alluvial digging.

A larger portion, as much as 14 percent of diamonds, are sourced by informal alluvial (also known as artisanal) diamond diggers. These artisanal diggers use extremely basic equipment, often no more than sieves and pans, in their search for diamonds, which often takes place on land that has neither been licensed nor regulated for mining activities to take place.

In order to reach the diamonds, diggers must remove the sand from the river banks on which they work and then extract and wash the gravel that lies underneath in the hope that a diamond will literally be found lying in the rough. This is the type of activity that was so painfully highlighted in the movie Blood Diamond. Angola and the DRC have the highest prevalence of small-scale alluvial diggers. All told, it is estimated that 1 million plus people in Africa work in the informal mining sector.

Concerns about the hazardous conditions in which these diggers operate are gradually becoming more widespread within the industry. Not only are many miners working in dangerous, unhealthy, and unregulated environments, but many, if not the majority, of the diggers are unaware of the true market value of the product that they are so desperately searching for, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation.

As such, the industry is beginning to set up a series of initiatives to try and combat some of these ills and to improve the lot of these workers. Two that have been especially singled out are the Diamond Development Initiative, and the Mwadui Community Diamond Partnership.