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Emerald, Ruby, Sapphire, Gemstone Mining

Billionaire Leviev Adds Zambia Emeralds to Diamond Portfolio – by Matthew Hill, Thomas Biesheuvel, Denver Kisting and Taonga Clifford Mitimingi (Bloomberg News – June 1, 2017)

https://www.bloomberg.com/

Billionaire Lev Leviev, who made his fortune undercutting De Beers’ former diamond monopoly, has bought half of one of Africa’s biggest emerald mines.

Leviev bought into the Grizzly emerald mine in Zambia’s Copperbelt province, which borders the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kombadayedu Kapwanga, managing director Leviev’s Namibian unit, said by phone. The operation has been renamed Gemcanton Investments Holdings.

A spokesperson for Africa Israel Investments Ltd., a listed company controlled in which Leviev is the biggest shareholder, didn’t return phone calls and emails seeking comment. A spokesperson at LLD Diamonds, Leviev’s jewelry business, didn’t return calls either. Leviev used his Israel-based diamond unit to purchase half of Grizzly, Kapwanga said, without providing further details.

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Bright Future: Analysts paint sparkling picture of coloured gemstone market – by Ilan Solomons (Mining Weekly.com – April 28, 2017)

http://www.miningweekly.com/

JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – The shift from small-scale artisanal mining to larger mechanised mining, owing to the increasing involvement of larger mining companies and greater formalisation of the sector, is expected to increase the distribution channel of the coloured gemstone industry, which will continue to consolidate as smaller market participants disappear.

This is also likely to result in improved transparency of the coloured gemstone industry over time, as larger mining houses are accountable to their shareholders as well as local and international operating regulations.

This is according to nonprofit organisation representing the coloured gemstone industry the International Coloured Gemstone Association former VP and senior industry analyst Jean Claude Michelou, who predicts that, in time, there will be “strong growth” in the sale of coloured gems in Brazil, Russia, India and China, particularly in India and China, which have a long-standing affinity for coloured gems.

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Sapphire rush overwhelms remote Madagascar rainforests – by Edward Carver (Toronto Star – April 2, 2017)

https://www.thestar.com/

The Associated Press – ANTANANARIVO, MADAGASCAR—A sapphire rush has brought tens of thousands of people into the remote rainforests of eastern Madagascar, disfiguring a protected environmental area and prompting calls for military intervention.

More high-quality sapphires have been found in the biodiverse area known as Corridor Ankeniheny-Zahamena in the past six months than were found in the entire country over the past 20 years, according to Vincent Pardieu, a French gemologist who has been visiting mines there for more than a decade and was in the area last month.

“I can tell you this is big,” Pardieu said. Gem trade shows around the world now have “nice, big, super-clean sapphires” from the region. “It’s the most important discovery in Madagascar for the past 20 or 30 years.”

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Mozambique ruby rush leads to gangland turf war – by AFP (eNCA.com – March 29, 2017)

https://www.enca.com/

MONTEPUEZ, Mozambique – The stakes are high in Montepuez where the discovery of rubies has led to violence among miners that has turned the northern town into what some describe as Mozambique’s own version of the Wild West.

Discovery of the red gemstone in 2009 sparked a “ruby rush”, with thousands of miners arriving to seek their fortune, but often finding only grim conditions, conflict and danger.

“We have a lot of foreigners who come from a lot of countries to look for rubies,” Tania Mabota, chief medical officer of Montepuez Hospital, told AFP. “There’s conflict for territory because it’s a means of subsistence for the artisanal miners,” she added. “One stone is enough for a person to be attacked.”

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Into the green land: Emerald mining in Colombia – by Javier Corso (Al Jazeera.com – March 20, 2017)

http://www.aljazeera.com/

Emerald seekers scour Colombia’s Muzo Valley, searching for the gem that could lift them out of poverty.

Muzo, Colombia – The struggle over land is Colombia’s oldest conflict. For decades the mines of Muzo – widely known as the “emerald capital of the world” – have produced great fortunes for their owners.

In the so-called “Green Wars” during the 1980s, territorial disputes escalated into full-blown conflict as the country’s leading mining families fought over territory.

In those days, the “barequeros” – emerald seekers who dig through debris – gathered by the thousands around the Muzo Valley, hoping that emeralds would arise from the dark soil to rescue them from extreme poverty.

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NEWS RELEASE: Winner of the 2016 Carnegie Mineralogical Award Announced

www.carnegiemnh.org

Carnegie Museum of Natural History named Anthony R. Kampf the winner.

Carnegie Museum of Natural History is pleased to announce that Anthony (Tony) R. Kampf, PhD, is the winner of the 2016 Carnegie Mineralogical Award. Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s Director Eric Dorfman, PhD, presented the award to Kampf on February 12, 2017 during the Saturday night awards banquet at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show.
The Carnegie Mineralogical Award honors outstanding contributions in mineralogical preservation, conservation, and education and is considered one of the most prestigious awards in the field of mineralogy.

“Dr. Kampf has consistently provided a high level of service to the amateur and professional mineral communities. I am very pleased to see him honored as the recipient of the 2016 Carnegie Mineralogical Award,” said Marc Wilson, curator of collections of the Section of Minerals at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

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Adventures of a Australian female opal miner – by Jason Bainbridge (The Age – February 26, 2017)

http://www.theage.com.au/

If Sue Cooper has a problem with her telephone reception, it is a 10-hour round trip for a Telstra Remote-Area Service technician in a four-wheel drive to fix it. If she needs to refuel? That’s a three-hour round trip with a 2000-litre tanker on a dirt track. And if she needs medical attention? Build your own airstrip in order for the Royal Flying Doctor Service to land.

Welcome to Sue Cooper’s life, six to seven months of every year, as an opal miner in western Queensland. One of Sue’s mining leases is on Mount Margaret Station, a pastoral lease that operates as a cattle station. Located about 50 kilometres west of the township of Eromanga (Australia’s furthest town from the sea), Mount Margaret was once Australia’s largest sheep station, occupying 600,000 hectares.

Sue is a relative through marriage, and I visited her mining camp in late 2016. To give a sense of scale out here, the “bush paddock” containing Sue’s small mining lease is a rugged, fenced-off corner of the property comprising 69,000 hectares – roughly the size of Singapore. Often Sue, her partner and her children are the only people out here.

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Fortune hunters flock to Madagascar’s sapphire mines (Agence France-Presse -January 8, 2017)

http://www.seychellesnewsagency.com/

(AFP) – The dusty figure is lowered slowly into the ground like a bucket into a well, armed with just a crowbar, a shovel and an old, unreliable headlamp. In the surrounding countryside, bodies rise and sink from hundreds of holes just wide enough for a man.

Children run between the rubble and the smell of cooking wafts from the makeshift shelters where women crouch over pots. Guards armed with hunting rifles stand by, turning the settlement of Betsinefe into a threatening scene. In the world of Madagascan sapphire mining, there are few rules.

Sapphires were first discovered in Madagascar in the late 1990s, and already the Indian Ocean island is one of the world’s largest producers of the precious stones. Its 250-kilometre-long (155-mile) deposit is among the biggest in the world and has sparked a sapphire rush.

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Ring-tailed lemurs face extinction amid sapphire-mining rush in Madagascar – by Ian Johnston (The Indpendent – December 21, 2016)

http://www.independent.co.uk/

The ring-tailed lemur of Madagascar is “disappearing right under our noses” as the iconic animal is hunted and trapped to extinction and its forest home is destroyed by people hunting for sapphires.

Lemurs are the most threatened group of vertebrates on the planet but it was thought the resourceful ring-tailed species – which featured in the hit cartoon film series Madagascar and the BBC’s recent Planet Earth II documentary – would be the last to die out.

However, despite their ability to survive in some of the harshest environments on the Indian Ocean island, they have been mostly reduced to small groups, researchers warned in a paper called Going, Going Gone: Is the Iconic Ring-railed Lemur Headed for Imminent Extirpation? in the journal Primate Conservation.

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A ‘sapphire rush’ has sent at least 45,000 miners into Madagascar’s protected rainforests – by Julia P G Jones (The Conservation – November 21, 2016)

http://theconversation.com/

The rainforests of Didy in eastern Madagascar usually ring with the calls of the indri, the island’s largest lemur. There is a different noise now: the chopping of trees, digging of gravel, and cheers of encouragement from the thousands of illegal miners who have flooded to these forests since sapphires were discovered in late September.

Bemainty, an area in the west of Didy, is experiencing a sapphire rush. Rosey Perkins, a gemologist, visited soon after the rush began in October. She estimated 45,000 people were already involved and that the mine was growing by 1,500 to 2,000 people a day. By now it may be significantly bigger. She told me:

“These gem deposits are found in the gravels of ancient river beds. Some are unusually large and have an attractive blue colour; there have been some phenomenal finds which are drawing in traders from as far away as Sri Lanka.”

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A million artisanal gold miners in Madagascar wait to come out of the shadows – by Emilie Filou (The Guardian – November 15, 2016)

https://www.theguardian.com/

The downturn in commodity prices has hit the mining industry globally but in Madagascar, it coincided with the end of a five-year period of turmoil, precipitated by a coup in 2009. Any hopes for the sector to propel itself back on the development track were dashed.

“Lots of mining companies came to Madagascar to explore [before 2009] but then we had the political crisis, with all the uncertainty and lack of visibility it brought, and even though we had elections in 2013, that uncertainty has not really lifted,” said Willy Ranjatoelina, executive secretary of the Madagascar Chamber of Mines.

In the mid-2000s, Madagascar had given the green light to two large-scale mining projects: Ambatovy, a $8bn (£6.4bn) nickel and cobalt project developed by a consortium led by Sherritt International, and QMM, a $1bn ilmenite project developed by Rio Tinto. Since then new projects have dried up.

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Illegal mining, weak government help Taliban expand in Afghan north – by Jawad Kakar (Reuters India – November 7, 2016)

http://in.reuters.com/

FAIZABAD, AFGHANISTAN – Afghan Taliban militants have strengthened their grip on lucrative illegal mining operations in the north of the country, as security forces focus most of their efforts on battling the insurgency in the volatile south, officials said.

Abuses by local commanders with private militias and beyond the purview of central government have also driven people into the hands of Islamist fighters, the officials added, making it easier for them to profit from small-scale mines in the region.

“The Taliban provide protection for the villagers to mine and the people are happy to do it despite the fact that there’s a presidential decree banning any uncontrolled mining,” said Gul Mohammad Bedar, deputy governor of Badakhshan province. He estimated that the militant group, fighting to overthrow the Western-backed government in Kabul, raised about a third of its funding needs in Badakhshan from deposits of minerals, including semi-precious lapis lazuli, found in its mountains.

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This startup is protecting Afghanistan’s prized rare emeralds – by Parija Kavilanz (CNN Money.com – August 29, 2016)

http://money.cnn.com/

In Afghanistan, where decades of warfare have ravaged the country, there’s a beautiful green oasis tucked between the mountains that’s home to something rare and precious.

The Panjshir Valley, located north of Afghanistan’s capital Kabul, is an area rich with more than 172 emerald mines. Known as Panjshir emeralds, the gems boast a unique bluish-green color that make them among the country’s most-iconic treasures.

Entrepreneur Habib Mohebi grew up in Kabul hearing about the emerald mines from friends local to that area. Years later, that knowledge would reconnect him to his homeland in a distinctive way.

Mohebi is the co-founder of Aria Gems, a company that mines and exports Panjshir emeralds.

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The dark side of gem stones in Colombia and beyond – by Eugen Iladi (Columbia Reports – July 26, 2016)

http://colombiareports.com/

The global market for colored gemstones, such as emeralds and rubies, is dominated by a few major players. One of the largest is Gemfields Plc, a U.K.-registered, London Stock Exchange-listed company with significant mining operations in Zambia, Mozambique, India, Sri Lanka and, recently, Colombia.

At first glance, things appear rosy at Gemfields, but a closer look reveals questionable deals and associations. As with blood diamonds, the precious stone trade purports to offer transparency, but many of its practices are murky and dark.

In September 2015, Gemfields announced a series of acquisitions in Colombia. The main target was a 70 percent stake in the Coscuez emerald mine in the mountainous province of Boyacá, one of the world’s best sources of emeralds.

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Emerald city: How gemstone-rich Colombia is embracing ethical sourcing – by Nathalie Atkinson (Globe and Mail – July 15, 2016)

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

It may be churlish of me to highlight this during wedding season, but as scientist and jeweller Aja Raden points out in her cultural history Stoned, gemstones are “just colourful gravel.” She elaborates on the fraught history and desire around precious objects – pearls, emeralds, wristwatches – with diamonds as one cautionary tale via Marie Antoinette, whose downfall was precipitated by jewellery.

The human history of attraction to bright shiny objects has not exactly been about supply chain integrity or corporate social responsibility – instead, think envy, greed, violence, suffering, slavery, incursions and the guillotine.

To understand the role of gems and jewels in luxury today, it’s necessary to consider, as Raden does, the brilliant “A diamond is forever” campaign that De Beers whipped up in 1947 after the South African diamond rush that saw the company gain control of 99 per cent of the planet’s diamonds.

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