Origin is now becoming a factor in the diamond industry, according to the CIBJO Diamond Commission, which released a special report yesterday.
CIBJO is the World Jewellery Confederation, representing all those earning their livelihoods from jewellery, gemstones and precious metals.
The report was released ahead of the 2023 CIBJO Congress to be held in Jaipur, India.
The special report addresses recent claims that technologies have developed that are able to accurately identify the exact location at which a rough diamond has been mined.
CIBJO Diamond Commission president Udi Sheintal said: “We can only state with confidence is what is known at present,” noting a May 2023 study by the Gemological Institute of America that declared that to date there has not been published any scientifically robust study verifying independent provenance determination of a random individual diamond.
Sheintal said the decision to purchase a diamond or any other gemstone or item of jewellery lay with the consumer.
“What we seek to make possible is that when they make it, they have all the information they require,” he said.
According to the report, the diamond industry traditionally sorted and valued its diamonds according to the 4Cs.
The 4Cs refer to a global standard for the four primary characteristics of a diamond: cut, colour, clarity, and carat.
“Even the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme, the system designed to eliminate conflict diamonds from the distribution chain, does not require the source of each diamond to be disclosed, but rather ensure the absence of goods from non-desirable locations,” the report said.
The report found that this sense of impartiality when it came to the source was in sharp contrast to the coloured gemstone sector for example, where specific geographic origins can translate into massive premiums being placed on a stone, with Kashmir sapphire being the most notable example.
Kashmir sapphires are among the rarest gemstones, mined in a remote and virtually inaccessible part of the Himalayas in the late 19th century.
“Origin is now becoming a factor in the diamond industry and this not because of any understanding that diamonds from one location may be any more or less desirable physically than diamonds from another location, but rather because certain regions are considered to pose lower ethical risk than other regions.
“That itself is a debatable hypothesis, especially if diamonds extracted by artisanal miners are considered high risk,” the report said.
The report warned that if those miners were automatically excluded from the supply chain, an often poverty-stricken sector would be cut off from their main source of income, and this was hardly an ethical outcome.
BUSINESS REPORT