Conflict Gems As Well.

Here is a post from Aussie Saphire printed with their permission. It helps to show that Conflict Diamonds is just part of the world problem with precious stones.

Ethical gemstone purchasing
We recently received an email from an American dealer which brought into sharp focus the difficulties faced by miners worldwide who have to negotiate with buyers who are only interested in the cheapest price with no consideration of ethical and environmental issues. His approach to trade negotation involved insulting our character and the quality of our product (sight unseen), quoting an amazingly low price he claims to have paid for unspecified sapphire rough from Africa and asking if we could match the price which was significantly below our cost of production. While we lose no sleep over not being able to do business with people like this, it did make us think about ethics in the gemstone industry and how the lack of it hurts everyone except these dealers who profit from paying too little and charging too much.

Here at Aussie Sapphire, we operate a commercial sapphire mine in Australia - a country with a high level of government regulation and very high running costs. In some ways, this puts us at a competitive disadvantage to producers from developing countries. However, we take pride in being able to offer a high quality product at comparable prices with sound ethical and environmental production methods. The following article provides some discussion of these issues and relevant links for those who are interested in ethical gemstone purchasing. One link I would like to focus on at this point is this excellent field trip report by Vincent Pardieu from the AIGS laboratory in Thailand - An update on Ruby and Sapphire mining in South East Asia and East Africa - some of the photos in this article come from this report (see acknowledgements).