African diamond firms must form a club - Endiama
September 22, 2006
By Zoe Eisenstein
Luanda - African diamond producers sought to bolster their influence by forging their own grouping to reverse a situation where key decisions were taken abroad, a senior Angolan official said yesterday.
The Association of African Diamond Producing Countries was due to be launched on November 4 in Luanda, said Sebastiao Panzo, a spokesperson for Angolan state diamond company Endiama.
"The people deciding on the price of diamonds and making policies on diamonds at the moment are non-producers in Antwerp and Israel … We, in Africa, need our own platform to discuss these issues … We need to unite our views and integrate them," he said.
Angola is the world's fifth-biggest diamond producer by value and the third largest on the continent after Botswana and South Africa. Since the end of the country's civil war in 2002, the government has been trying to bolster the industry, which experts say has great potential for growth.
Panzo said geology specialists from 17 African diamond producing nations had been in Luanda last month to thrash out the details of the association, which would likely have its headquarters in Luanda. They were set to return at the start of November ahead of the group's official launch. - Reuters
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