Word: diamonds
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...Neil Diamond Home Before Dark; out now Forty years in, and his songs still teeter on grievance and end in self-pity. At least they're not so corny. Producer Rick Rubin adds discipline where Diamond needs it, keeping the arrangements simple and the choruses from getting too show-bizzy. What's left is miraculously both quietly compelling and recognizably Neil Diamond...
Botswana, the world's biggest producer of diamonds, has proved an exception to this rule, raising its 1.9 million people out of poverty within the span of a generation. The country's forward-thinking leaders have persuaded a global mining giant to invest in its happy road to development. De Beers, the world's largest diamond-mining company and a name once synonymous with the imperial multinational, has operated its mines with the government for decades as a 50-50 partnership called Debswana. Now De Beers has deepened that cooperation by moving its worldwide diamond-sorting and -valuing operation from...
...makeover almost as dramatic as Botswana's. For a century, De Beers (founded by the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes but named after the family on whose South African farm the Kimberley mine was discovered) was a secretive near monopoly that extracted or bought 70% of the world's diamond supply in order to keep prices artificially high. Under the leadership of Gareth Penny, who joined the board in 2002 and became managing director in 2006, the group sold off its entire diamond stock and now sells only diamonds it mines itself (40% of global output). Gone too is the secrecy...
...Beers unveiled the most significant symbol of that transformation in March, when it hosted a dinner in Gaborone, in the atrium of what is now De Beer's main diamond-sorting, -valuing and -aggregating unit. The glass-and-steel construction will employ 500 Batswana and generate a further 2,500 ancillary jobs, particularly in 16 cutting and polishing factories set up around the new plant, and on its sorting benches, which will process a total of 34 million carats a year--22% of world output--or $6 billion in diamonds by 2009. "Our diamonds are for development," Botswana's then...
While their impact on the country may be immense, De Beers' diamonds do not actually spend much time in Botswana. Once unearthed, stones will spend a few weeks passing through De Beers' plants, and a few more in cutting and polishing, before they are flown to jewelry makers around the world--all told, about three months after coming out of the ground. The De Beers marketing slogan "A diamond is forever" is not quite true in Botswana. However, for the country's growth, for now, that's enough...