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
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".
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.
"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
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A Cred dog-tag displays what Cred Jewellery stands for