The True Cost of Mined Diamonds to Humans: Canada, Venezuela, and Artisan Mining - Part 2

By Isabelle Lincoln-Moore 28th April 2026 6 min read

The True Human Cost of Mined Diamonds: Beyond Africa

Part four of four | Ethica Diamonds, Newquay, Cornwall

In the previous blog we focused on Africa - the Kimberley Process, Zimbabwe, Angola, Botswana, and the ways in which certification has failed to protect people from the consequences of diamond mining.

The assumption that often follows this kind of information is that these problems are unique to regions with weaker governance. That diamonds from Canada or other wealthy nations are different. That the human cost is something that happens elsewhere.

It is not that simple.

Canada: The Victor Mine and the Attawapiskat Community

The Victor Mine in Ontario was operated by De Beers on the traditional territory of the Cree Nation, approximately 90 kilometres upstream from the Attawapiskat community. In 2011, Attawapiskat made international headlines because of a severe housing crisis and a failing sewage system - this in a community sitting on the doorstep of one of the most productive diamond mines in the country.

Canadian law requires mining companies to create Impact and Benefit Agreements with indigenous communities, providing compensation for the use of their land. At Victor, this agreement was administered through a Joint Venture structure that limited the amount of money actually reaching the community.

Modern Canadian mines typically employ fly-in workers who live elsewhere and spend their wages elsewhere. The community bears the environmental and social burden of proximity to the mine. The economic benefit largely does not reach them.

Canada is frequently cited as an example of responsible diamond mining. And by some measures it is. But responsible is doing a lot of work in that sentence when a community living beside a billion-dollar mine cannot maintain functional housing or sewage infrastructure.

Zimbabwe: Where the Money Goes

We touched on Zimbabwe in the previous blog in relation to human rights abuses at the Marange diamond fields. The financial picture is equally troubling.

In 2012, the Zimbabwean government anticipated receiving $600 million in diamond revenues. The finance minister reported receiving $43 million. In 2013, $61 million was expected and nothing was declared. In 2014, $96 million was projected and nothing was reported.

Where the money went is not known with certainty. What is known is that Zimbabwe is a country where 75% of the population lives below the poverty line despite extraordinary natural resources. In the years these revenues went undeclared, the government faced a shortfall of $58 million for a programme to get vulnerable children into education, leaving over 900,000 children at risk. Around two million people needed food assistance totalling nearly $12 million, of which only $1.6 million could be allocated.

Diamond wealth exists in Zimbabwe. It does not reach the people who need it.

Venezuela: The Orinoco Mining Belt

Venezuela's political situation has been volatile and deeply troubled for over a decade. Within that context, a vast mining territory was carved from 12% of the country's land, including tropical forests and fertile river basins along the Orinoco River, in an initiative designed to reduce the country's financial dependency on oil.

The Orinoco Mining Belt encompasses gold, diamonds, iron, and other minerals. The environmental cost is enormous - massive deforestation of an area that had previously been under strict mining prohibition due to its ecological fragility. Nineteen indigenous tribes live within or adjacent to this territory. Their concerns about the loss of their lands and livelihoods have largely been dismissed by the courts.

International silence on this issue has been notable. The scale of the environmental destruction and the displacement of indigenous peoples has not generated the same level of attention as conflicts in other regions, despite being equally serious.

Artisan Mining: The Forgotten Twenty Percent

Approximately 20% of the world's gem-quality diamonds are produced not by industrial operations but by artisan miners - individuals and small groups working with basic tools in riverbeds, floodplains, and shallow surface deposits across Africa and South America.

This sector is largely unregulated, frequently operating illegally, and consistently bound up with exploitation and unsafe working conditions. Men, women, and children stand for hours in stagnant water sifting through sediment by hand, often under coercion, with no safety equipment and no legal protections.

The process itself destroys the land. Sifting through the sandy sub-layers of soil to find diamonds removes the good topsoil that sits above, leaving behind land that cannot support farming. Communities that depended on agriculture for their livelihoods find themselves with neither farmland nor diamond wealth - the benefits of which flow to intermediaries and traders, not to the people doing the work.

Brazil: Conflict on Indigenous Land

In the Rondonia region of Brazil, the Cinta Larga Indians have been in ongoing conflict with artisan miners operating on their ancestral lands since the 1960s. A series of government revisions to the boundaries of their territory - each revision making it smaller - has reduced both the land available to them and the population that can be sustained on it.

Clashes between artisan miners and the Cinta Larga have resulted in deaths on both sides. Some community members, left with diminishing land resources, have turned to mining themselves as a means of survival. It is a cycle of dispossession that has been running for sixty years and continues today.

The Pattern

What connects Canada, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Brazil, Angola, and Botswana is a pattern that repeats regardless of geography or governance structure. Diamonds are extracted. The wealth generated by that extraction concentrates in the hands of companies, governments, and intermediaries. The communities closest to the mines - who bear the greatest environmental and social cost - receive the smallest share of the benefit, if any at all.

This is not a failure of individual bad actors. It is a structural feature of how the mined diamond industry operates. And it is a feature that no amount of certification or industry assurance has fundamentally changed.

When you buy a mined diamond, you cannot know with certainty whose land was taken, whose community was displaced, or whose labour funded the mine that produced it. That uncertainty is built into the supply chain.

There Is an Alternative

We are not writing this series to make you despair. We are writing it because we believe the alternative genuinely exists and genuinely works - and people deserve to know about it.

A lab grown diamond has a supply chain short enough to understand and transparent enough to verify. No community is displaced in its creation. No indigenous territory is taken. No government receives revenues that fail to reach its people. The stone is grown, cut, polished, and certified in a process that we can describe to you in full.

At Ethica Diamonds in Newquay, that transparency is not a selling point we add at the end. It is the reason we exist.