Finished jewelry is not subject to the Kimberly Process and documentation. As it should be. Can you imagine having to carry your Kimberly paperwork everywhere you go when you travel just to prove that you aren’t a diamond smuggler? The problem is that more and more people are putting rough stones in finished jewelry. I love the look by the way.

So now you have the possibility of a small artisan miner finding a large stone, setting it in a simple wire wrapped necklace and smuggling it out of the country to be sold or cut elsewhere. Artisan mines are similar one or two guys working a very small claim like the gold rush days in the Alaska and California. How can you stop it? I certainly don’t know. But it does lead me to my original thoughts on Blood Diamonds and the Kimberly Process.

I’ve always thought that it was a token effort to make people “feel good” about themselves and what they were doing rather than actually trying to address the real problem of substandard living conditions and the rest of the world being willing to look the other way for the sake of money. There have been a few highly publicized arrests involving diamond smuggling, and there has been some good done in the mining towns in Africa. But I think that those things would have been, and were being, done without all the drama of the Di’Caprio movie and the drum beating that we have seen over the last few years.

So what’s next? Even more regulation, even more paperwork, and still no real lasting improvement for the mine workers is my guess.