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As good as gold can be

02 November 2006

The fairtrade market boasts more than 1500 certified products. Now a Christian jeweller is trying to add to the list by cleaning up an industry tainted by conflict and environmental degradation, says Malcolm Doney


 

DONAY

Above: Greg Valerio, who has been instrumental in setting up the Association of
responsible mining: His efforts to find a "clean" source of gold led him to the Corporadtion
Oro Verde in Columbia  (Chichester Observer)

GREG VALERIO pulls off his wedding ring with a flourish and brandishes it in the air. "I bought this 12 years ago. It weighs about 10 grams, but it’s responsible for between one-and-a-half and two tons of cyanide waste. That one ring."

The young jeweller stares at the ring, whose dark history clearly still appals him. "It’s absolutely mind-blowing that that little piece of gold could create nearly two tons of toxic waste."

And that’s just the cyanide. Take into account the mercury, the nitric acid, and the huge piles of waste rock (two-thirds of all gold extraction comes from open-pit mining) that can leach toxic metals and acid into soil and water, and suddenly pure gold looks tarnished. Cumulatively, according to Oxfam’s "no-dirty-gold" campaign, this adds up to a staggering 20 tons of waste for every wedding ring sold on the high street.

Then there are diamonds. Diamonds have their own troubled history. For many years the illicit influx of "conflict" or "blood" diamonds into the mainstream jewellery market helped to fuel conflicts in countries such as Angola, Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sierra Leone.

This black market has been stemmed by the flawed but largely effective Kimberley certification process — a joint voluntary initiative by governments, the international diamond industry, and civil society, launched in 2002, which requires jewellers to testify to the non-conflict origins of their gemstones.

Nevertheless, says Mr Valerio, this definition of "non-conflict" does not cover the exploitation of indigenous people. "Every small-scale miner you talk to will tell you they are being exploited. So, where you don’t have the high-profile civil wars, under the surface you have this low-level violence, called poverty and exploitation, around the edges of all diamond and gold extraction."

This makes Mr Valerio angry with his colleagues in the industry. "Here is an industry as ancient as the hills, full of creativity and promise, and yet with its head so far up its own arse on social and environmental concerns that it’s swinging on its own tonsils."

Rather than simply rail against this injustice, he decided to do something about it. He launched what he believes to be the UK’s first ever fairtrade wedding-ring collection — a range that has brought him to the attention of The Observer. Cred Jewellery, based in Chichester, has been shortlisted for the newspaper’s 2006 ethical awards.

"When you buy a certified ring, you’re not getting any of that exploitation, any of that crap, any raping of the environment," he enthuses. "By introducing fairtrade at the [quality] end of the jewellery world, we’ll hopefully rewrite the way the jewellery is done."

The energetic 39-year-old "social entrepreneur" was forced to leave school at 15, having been told he was "an uneducable waste of space". He found no real focus until the age of 19, when his spiritual searchings led him to Christian conversion. He developed a passion to follow a "radical Christ" who "rewrote history".

RING

In the early 1990s, his church in Chichester, where he was partly responsible for youth work, asked him to undertake development education (dealing with human rights, environmental issues, trade aid, and debt) in local secondary schools. "Acutely aware that I didn’t have any international experience, I went to Tanzania in 1993, and to Ethiopia in 1994." This helped provide the first-hand information he needed. More than that, he became convinced that international aid was not the solution to poverty. What was needed was trade, jobs, work.

"For me, it’s not enough just to talk about something, or even to campaign about it. You have to model it. You have to incarnate it — that’s what it means to follow the radical Christ."

AND SO, in 1996 he set up a company importing batik paintings from artists he worked with in Tanzania. They didn’t sell well, so he started to import jewellery from Africa and India. By 2000, he was doing well enough to open a shop in Chichester.

His intention was always to develop fairly traded jewellery, but suppliers were so difficult to source that in 2002 he commissioned Greenwich University — with the help of funding from the Department for International Development (DfID) — to research the impact of the UK jewellery industry on the poor in the source areas. The results shocked him.

He had some personal, anecdotal evidence from visits to places such as open-cast garnet mines in the Rajasthani desert of India. "I’d seen women with kids in 150 degrees of heat scrabbling around in the dirt trying to find the gemstones, being ripped off by the guy who owned the mining rights," he says. The research more than backed this up.

DOGTAG

"The report threw up that there were massive social, environmental, and livelihood issues facing the whole supply chain for jewellery," he recalls. "Broadly, extractive industries are the most polluting in the world."

Mr Valerio quotes a litany of bleak statistics. Mining is the second-biggest employer in the world after agriculture. Only 20 per cent of these people are employed by large-scale mining companies; i.e. 80 per cent of all people working in mining and extractive industries (around 100 million all told) are small-scale surface miners, gold-panners, diamond-diggers, and the like. Their total earnings are less than 20 per cent of the volume they create. So, Mr Valerio concludes: "The inequity that sits behind what you see on the jeweller’s shelf is vast, huge, and global in its reach."

His response was anger. "I’m a Christian, a jeweller, and I have a responsibility before God, to my customers, and to the industry as a whole, to offer the best product. I don’t want the product on my shelves to be raping the environment to make somebody beautiful.

"You want to make sure, when you step up to the altar to get married, that the thing you’re giving as a symbol of pure love and undivided devotion has not been made as a result of exploiting countless people down the line. It’s a contradiction in terms."

Having seen the Greenwich report, he determined that he would look at how he could develop a supply chain from mine to customer that was free of exploitation.

IN HIS SEARCH for "clean" sources of gold, he ended up finding a small but rich seam in what might, at first, appear an unpromising place: Colombia. The Corporacion Oro Verde, the "Green Gold Corporation", is an alliance of non-government organisations and community councils representing collectives of small-scale miners.

These small-scale miners include people like Américo, who mines the gold- and platinum-rich soil in the river beds of the heavily forested Tado region of the Chacol. Américo, a father of eight in his mid-40s, is the descendant of generations of alluvial miners, originally slaves brought here by the Spanish conquistadors to extract gold. He uses no cyanide, and carefully replaces the topsoil he has removed, building terraces ready for reforestation.

He finds 20 grams or so of gold a day, and sells it to a local not-for-profit marketing organisation. It ensures that not only Américo and his workers make a living, but also that the local community and environment benefit as well. Oro Verde refines 18-carat gold by using the minimum of chemicals.

At this point Greg Valerio buys the gold, paying the London spot price for the gold, plus a 10-per-cent social premium for the ongoing welfare of the mining communities and their environment. He then uses a Colombian jeweller to turn it into wedding bands.

This process is fully certificated and, to all intents and purposes, makes the Cred Jewellery collection fairly traded. But it cannot yet be labelled as such, or receive the coveted Fairtrade mark. The Fairtrade Foundation and labelling organisation have not yet developed a certification process to cover mining: organisations like Oro Verde are few and far between.

To help establish industry standards of best practice, and as a means of establishing a fairtrade process, Mr Valerio has joined with his Colombian partners to found the Association for Responsible Mining. This is helping other small-scale mining communities around the world who are keen to learn from the experience of Colombia. The intention is that the Association will take the standards set up in Colombia and turn them into a generic fairtrade standard for small-scale miners, applicable around the world, and acceptable to accreditors at the Fairtrade Foundation.

All these parties are to meet in London this month to harmonise codes of ethics. Mr Valerio expects that, within 18 months, he will be able to sell gold and platinum bearing the Fairtrade logo.

With a fair wind, he will not be the only one. There is a burgeoning enthusiasm among mining communities to get involved. Last year in Sri Lanka, the Association for Responsible Mining made a presentation to the World Bank’s committee on small-scale mining, attended by many small-scale mining groups from around the world. As a result, "We had 52 groups from 38 countries asking to join us," Mr Valerio reports. The more groups who join, the more fairly traded gold and platinum will make its way into the high street.

this is just the start. Mr Valerio’s vision is to have every commodity in the jewellery supply chain — every metal and gemstone — fairtrade. To that end, diamonds are next in his sight.

He is now talking with the major diamond-mining companies, the Fairtrade Foundation, and the recently launched Diamond Development Initiative to start a pilot micro-project with an alluvial diamond-mining community, probably in a stable African country.

At this prospect, Mr Valerio becomes even more animated. "The great thing about the diamond is that it’s the great iconic image of luxury and wealth. This gives us the opportunity to start to rewrite the mythology around the diamond. It’s not just for the rich and famous — by buying this stone you’re driving the wealth of these things back downstream so that everyone in the supply chain gets benefits."

"For me, as a Christian committed to the poor, fairtrade delivers benefits to the poor in a way that, economically, no other framework does. I think it’s the closest thing I know to reflecting God’s righteousness in economics. That’s why we do it.

"Anyone can flag up an injustice — we’re surrounded by them. My challenge is to build an alternative model that works, and which does something to get rid of the injustice."

The Observer Ethical Awards are at www.observer.guardian.co.uk/ ethicalawards

www.cred.tv; www.fairtrade.org.uk

DOGGER

A Cred dog-tag displays what Cred Jewellery stands for

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