Guyana has been vigilant with the trade of its diamonds long before the advent of the Kimberly Process Certifica-tion Scheme (KP-CS), Acting Commis-sioner of Mines William Woolford has said.
And he insists that there is no indication that blood diamonds are coming to Guyana from any of the conflict diamonds reputed African nations like Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo or the Ivory Coast.
Speaking to Stabroek News recently, Woolford said that at its recently held plenary meeting, the KPCS recommended what the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) had pledged to do: make modifications to the way trading of diamonds is administered in Guyana.
He said it would be good for Guyana to collaborate with Venezuela and Brazil on the administration of the trade in these countries. This was one of the recommendations of the latest report from Partnership Africa Canada (PAC), one of the NGOs responsible for the setting up of the KPCS.
The PAC estimates the volume of Venezuelan diamonds entering Guyana on a yearly basis to be somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 carats out of total production figure upward of 400,000 carats.
It said these diamonds would have come through diamond dealers in Brazil.
He said the GGMC has been alert to the many suggestions in the reports on how things could go wrong, but insisted that Guyana had crafted its own regulations long before 2002 when the KPCS came into being.
According to Woolford, the KPCS is being applied in Guyana and it is an ongoing process. And in spite of what the PAC reports say, he said, there have been successes. “We will continue to talk to people in the industry to encourage self regulation,” he said.
Woolford doesn’t believe everything said in the reports about Guyana’s trade. He said the official from the GGMC couldn’t get any evidence of Guyana’s diamond smuggling during the meeting in Botswana.
“We’ve had situations where from time to time we would find people with diamonds [in their possession] without the requisite documentation,” he said, adding that because of this, the GGMC has had to be more serious with the application of procedures. He said the GGMC has been alert in dealing with the issue of diamonds coming into Guyana from Brazil or Venezuela.
The last PAC report said there was a correlation between the production figures of Guyana and Venezuela: when one country’s production is up, the other’s is proportionately down.
In 2004 diamond production reached an all-time high of 425,000 carats while diamond declaration in 2002 and the years before was at least 50 per cent less.
But Woolford said there is justification for the increase in declarations and it did not mean that smuggled diamonds were accounting for the increases.
“We try to track the means of production for the diamonds that are declared
