Rich man, poor man: development diamonds and poverty diamonds:

Based on travel to diamond fields in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Angola and the DRC, the study examines the reality on the ground. Going directly to the one million diggers who earn a subsistence living from alluvial diamonds, the aim of this study is to examine the real economic potential of alluvial diamonds for changing their lives and for generating meaningful macroeconomic growth.Findings of the study are:artisanal alluvial diamond mining will never generate large amounts of revenue for the governments in question as the nature of artisanal mining makes any kind of meaningful taxation almost impossiblemost artisanal diggers, working in a casino economy and hoping to strike it rich, actually earn an average of only a dollar a day, placing them squarely in the "absolute poverty" income bracketthere are opportunities to increase the earnings of miners, the constraints, however, are enormous and political, economic, social and historical in their naturereal change could reduce the chaos and instability that the diamond fields spawn, and diamonds could be the generator of decent incomes for hundreds of thousands of families, rather than the centre of unsafe, unhealthy, badly-paid piecework.