I’m going to go ahead an once again link to and quote my favorite Martin Rapaport speech from TEDx:

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Just because it doesn’t work doesn’t mean you don’t have good intentions, so you’re not a bad person, you just realize that the unintended consequences or your good intentions, that’s what’s gonna rule. So be careful with your intentions. And just because you’re a nice person trying to do a nice thing, doesn’t mean you are doing the “right” thing.”

Let’s assume you’re a resident of the DRC, specifically in the borderlands with Angola. Your economic opportunities are largely minimal, and one of the most promising paths is illegally entering comparatively more promising lands of the Lundas of Angola to mine for diamonds with a shovel and sieve. You risk torture and rape by Angolan private security companies, in addition to the usual risks of being an artisanal miner, such as death by cave-in, drowning, violence, malaria, etc. Or perhaps at no fault of your own, you live in Marange or the Central African Republic under similar circumstances. But you’ve also got hungry mouths to feed, so Dodd-Frank, the KP or other feel-good schemes be damned: the risks must be assumed.

Along comes a crazy-haired white New Yorker and self-styled researcher (really just a guy with an internet connection) who’s never lived in a war zone, and has been on TV a few times, specifically telling the relatively few consumers that do care about where their diamonds come from, to specifically avoid the resources that are your only economic option and livelihood, all because your government is corrupt and our country can’t meet some Western feel-good standard. Instead, he says, consumers should buy diamonds coming from your comparatively wealthy neighbors in Botswana. He’s certainly well intentioned, but how “good” is it to advise avoiding my diamonds (and everybody that brings them to market), just because, far downstream of me, they transit through Dubai or through some manufacturer with a checkered past and shady ties? How rational is it to essentially punish the people most ill-equipped to meet your “responsibly sourced”, “conflict-free” standards? Moreover, clearly it’s not rational to essentially sanction an entire large country because of problems existing in some regions with some companies and some resources, but that is what has apparently happened in the DRC. Shouldn’t the accent be on responsible sourcing, and on being “conflict-managed” rather than on a possibly unachievable “conflict free”?

The biggest thing I’ve learned through this whole experience is that complex problems imply complex solutions. The more I think about diamonds and the words “good” and “bad”, the more confused and less pointed I get. There is often very little connection between raw materials and finished products, and as far I’ve learned, little to nothing we can do on the consumer end to make that connection. We’re left to simply take a company’s word for it.