Gareth Penny, De Beers Group managing director, called on diamond traders in Europe, the U.S. and Israel to back Africa’s efforts to cut and polish its own gemstones.

“We don’t embrace this out of some misguided enthusiasm or altruism, we embrace it because it makes good business sense and because it’s the right thing to do,” he told a diamond industry conference in Antwerp.

“We need a strong and stable set of producing companies if we have to maximize future supply. Producing and selling diamonds today in or from a country in chaos or worse, in conflict, is simply not an option,” Penny said.

Africa’s natural resources have enriched traders across the world and Penny called on the gemstone business in Antwerp, Tel Aviv and New York to fund and help train the infant industry, mostly based in South Africa and Botswana — which owns 15 percent of De Beers.

“Without the traditional cutting centers, these new cutting centers will not succeed,” he said, promising they would also gain from new opportunities.

Botswana mining ministry official Kago Moshashane said the country planned to create up to 3,000 jobs in the diamond processing industry.

Antwerp, which once sparkled as the focus of the diamond cutting trade, has ceded its place to India’s Mumbai which now cuts most of the world’s diamonds, many of them less costly small stones. The port city that grew wealthy from Belgium’s rule of the Congo is now an important focus for diamond trading and finance.

The De Beers chief was upbeat about Africa’s future, saying the company was spending more than US$100 million (€71 million) every year to seek new mines, “overwhelmingly in Africa and significantly in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Angola.”