GUYANA will soon engage a legal consultant to review the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS), which will ensure that the country’s diamonds are not infiltrated. The KPCS was launched in 2003 in a bid to clean up the diamond trade after it was recognised that the precious stone was used to finance wars and terrorism. It requires member states to set up an import/export system for rough diamonds. Over 75 per cent of the world’s diamond-producing, trading and manufacturing countries participate in the scheme.
The KPCS is administered in Guyana by the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) with cooperation from the Customs Trade Administration and the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA).
Cabinet Secretary and Minister of State, Joseph Harmon, said that the last report of Guyana’s KPCS was submitted in 2014. “It’s not just about the diamond production in Guyana. The fact that you can have infiltrated into the Guyana diamond productions, diamonds that are from what you call “blood diamonds” source. What it does in fact is clean up the “blood diamonds” by infiltrating the local market and then it actually goes to sale on the international market,” Minister Harmon said.
He explained that this process is to ensure that Guyana’s international buyers do not question the credibility of the diamonds produced.
“So this process is really meant to ferret out that type of diamonds, because there are some special techniques which they employ for determining which are these diamonds and show that they do not contaminate the local diamond production,” the Cabinet Secretary said.
The KPCS was established in 2003 to prevent “conflict diamonds” from entering the mainstream rough diamond market by United Nations General Assembly Resolution 55/56 following recommendations in the Fowler Report.
In December 2016, the GGMC revealed that diamond production has been on the increase for the past five years, with some 99,000 carats being the latest production figure up to the end of November, 2016.
With The Netherlands, Belgium and the Arabian countries remaining big buyers of Guyana’s diamonds; and with the country maintaining a clean slate in the industry, it is expected that more miners will develop an interest in diamond production, even as Government moves to push production levels higher.