Contrasting Visions of Ethics and Transparency

This volume asks how transparency works. In the case of ruby mining in Northern Mozambique, transparency is bundled with broader concerns of ethics and responsibility in mining and trading. Indeed, as Van Bockstael (Reference Van Bockstael2018: 53) points out, these terms are often used interchangeably. Ethical and responsible mining is supposed to benefit the people in the places where resources are extracted. It is supposed to abide by local laws and international standards, contribute tax revenue, and avoid things such as child labor, unsafe working conditions, and the sexual exploitation of women in mining areas. But companies have responsibilities to their investors as well. They must disclose relevant financial information. They must also make predictions about their future profitability and disclose potential reputational and even physical risks to those profits.

These forms of responsibility, ethics, and transparency, which I call a regime of “coercive expertise,” are produced far from the Montepuez region of Cabo Delgado where people actually dig for rubies. A certification authority in London audits materials provided by mining companies and deems them responsible in order to assuage the consciences of retail jewelers and their wealthy clients. A law firm in another part of London dispatches investigators to Mozambique to contest these claims. A consultant in Dublin writes the regulations by which the mining code of Mozambique should be implemented to the supposed benefit of small-scale miners. Competent persons in Wales evaluate the extent of the resource to be mined and the profits that it might yield. Consultants based in Britain collect information about communities around mines and furnish it to mining companies in order that the companies can benefit those people through their corporate social responsibility programs, but also in order that they can prevent locals from infringing on their concession. At the same time, they map illegal networks of ruby mining and trading that might compete with the corporate miners.

These experts from across northwestern Europe have profound impacts on the lives of people in Northern Mozambique. They seem to have even contributed to creating the conditions of possibility for an armed insurgency. Their expertise allowed the mining company to violently displace local artisanal miners, while continuing to claim that its operations are responsible, ethical, and transparent.

Although in the Introduction to this volume the editors remind us that “transparency has become ubiquitous,” it is not so ubiquitous in the colored gemstone industry. I immediately alienated a high-end gem trader in Geneva whom I was trying to interview by telling him that I had come to his country to study transparency. Like many other members of traditional gem-trading families, he believed that efforts to impose transparency on the gem industry were led by corporate miners and corporate retail jewelry companies to subvert the international relationships of kinship, faith, and trust that have structured the gem trade for centuries. We see in both Samarawickrema’s and Shuman’s contributions to this volume (Chapters 3 and 6) that secrecy, and opacity, and even ignorance and deception can be ethical action in the gem trade. A perfectly traceable, transparent supply chain would make it impossible for people to do business. Rubies touch too many hands, pass through too many borders (and even the occasional colon), to make their journey completely legible. That is what makes artisan-mined gemstones capable of sustaining so many communities around the world. The ethics of the gem trade are refractory to the audit-based ethics of transparency.

The Most Precious Substance on Earth

Gem-quality ruby may be the most precious substance on earth. The traditional heartland of ruby mining is the Mogok Valley of Burma (Scalisi and Cook Reference Scalisi and Cook1983). Some retailers consider Burmese rubies to be tainted by the human rights violations of the Myanmar military junta and refuse to sell them (National Jeweler 2008). Even so, supplies are scant. When rubies were discovered in Mozambique in 2009, this seemed to promise a large and relatively untainted supply of the red stones for the global market.

From 2009 to 2012, there was a ruby rush. Perhaps 10,000 people migrated to a remote area near the town of Montepuez in the Cabo Delgado province of Northern Mozambique. A local political and military figure formed a company and secured the legal right to extract rubies on a vast concession. He went looking for an international partner to do the actual mining. A UK-based gemstone-mining corporation paid him $3 million for a majority stake in his company and began operations.

This was difficult because the company was trying to open a large, mechanized mining operation in an area where thousands of people were already working. That work is illegal because the miners did not have licenses and because mining rights to that area had been conceded to a company. But the concession is vast, comprising hundreds of hectares; it was not fenced or signed; and there were six villages of people who had previously been subsistence farmers located inside of it.

The process of establishing the mining operation entailed the use of violence. That violence did not end when formal mining operations had begun. Allegations have been documented in painful and painstaking detail by a human rights law firm that sued the mining company in the UK.Footnote ² Videos have appeared on social media and subsequently in the French press.Footnote ³ They seem to show company security personnel directing Mozambican military and vigilante groups in the torture and sexual humiliation of miners working on their concession. The allegations and the videos are consistent with what miners and traders told me about their treatment at the hands of multiple security forces when I was in Mozambique.

This process took place in the context of a larger mining boom in Mozambique. The World Bank funded a technical assistance program for the extractive sector. This brought about a series of regulatory reforms that allowed foreign companies to extract mineral resources. They came in droves. My notes from a conversation with a World Bank consultant involved in this initiative say that, for a while, you couldn’t get a room in a hotel. You couldn’t get a table at a restaurant. And everyone wanted licenses. It was during this time that the political and military leader in Cabo Delgado secured his concession.

The UK-based mining company with which he partnered has been at the forefront of marketing responsible minerals. It used to bill itself as “The World’s Most Ethical Mining Company” in its advertisements. Eventually, it realized that this grandiose claim could carry some liabilities. Now it has a somewhat less snappy tagline, but ethics and responsibility are still central to how the company presents itself to the public.

The chief executive officer of the company, when I talked to him, was eager to ensure that they not be portrayed as “light saber-wielding Darth Vaders.” Indeed they are not. The executives of the company almost certainly did not direct their security forces to employ vigilantes to sexually humiliate informal miners. The company seems to have taken steps (including human rights training) to prevent its security personnel from doing such things again. The alleged abuses, disturbing as they are, pale in comparison to some of the enormities committed by mining companies and their allies elsewhere. It implements corporate social responsibility programs with more vigor than many other companies in the sector.

One of the ways in which it demonstrates its responsibility is by hiring consultants to speak with people in the surrounding community about how the mine can help them. There is one consultancy in particular that has staked itself out as the specialists in artisanal and small-scale mining. They work for the World Bank and national development agencies to help legitimize artisanal mining. But they also hire their services out to corporate clients.

For corporate clients, they use the techniques of social science research to conduct what they term “social terrain mapping.” (A phrase with disturbing echoes of the United States Army’s Human Terrain Systems program.) They look at the functioning of the economy built on illegal artisanal mining and try to find “leverage points” that the company can use to disrupt it.

You would be hard-pressed to find a group of people more knowledgeable and sympathetic toward artisanal miners. When they work for the World Bank or development agencies, they work with the miners’ best interests in mind. Even when they work for corporate clients, they try to help them see artisanal mining as a sociological problem rather than a law enforcement problem to be solved by the police or the army. This is good for the artisanal miners themselves.

But when you talk to their corporate clients, they describe the information they get from their consultants as “intel.” They highlight the fact that consultants can get better information because they are not seen as being associated with the company. The consultants tend to depict the artisanal miners as foreigners (and therefore not worthy of legal protection) or else as pawns in the hands of networks of traders that they describe as “international criminal organizations.”

The Ethics of Informality

The mining company holds rough ruby auctions several times per year in Singapore. These are silent auctions where a small number of companies are invited to present sealed bids for sorted and graded lots of rough ruby, which they then treat, cut, and polish, mostly in Thailand.

These auctions generate significant revenue, perhaps $50 million to $75 million each. Twenty-four percent of that revenue is paid back to the government of Mozambique as taxes and royalties. This is a significant source of cash for a government that is plagued by political instability and financial crisis. The company is scrupulous in its accounting and evidently proud to be one of the largest taxpayers in the region. This is one of the grounds for its claims to transparency.

In contrast, the people who mine rubies illegally in Mozambique do not have access to jewelry retailers. There is a long, informal supply chain connecting the two. In 2016, a corps of expatriate African traders – mostly West African Muslims, but also people from all over the continent – converged in Montepuez. They would “grubstake” Mozambican and Tanzanian diggers, providing them with food and tools to look for rubies for the traders to purchase. The expatriate African traders then sold the stones to a group of Thai gemstone buyers who had taken up residence in Montepuez. A smaller contingent of Sri Lankan traders also bought in the area. When I was in Mozambique in 2016, this commerce occurred quite openly. Since then, there has been a crackdown on the Asian community in Montepuez and an outbreak of hostilities across northern Cabo Delgado. The logic of the informal trade has changed, but West Africans still mediate between people who extract stones informally and the buyers who will cut and polish them abroad.

Asian buyers export the stones informally to Thailand and Sri Lanka. There, the rough gemstones are treated, cut, and polished. They pass from hand to hand among a number of traders as they find their way to Bangkok and Colombo. From there they journey to jewelry markets in the United States, China, India, and Europe. This is how the informal market seemed to work when I observed it in Mozambique in 2016 and in Thailand and Sri Lanka after that.

The informal ruby trade does not generate tax revenue. It is taxed informally as law enforcement personnel, customs authorities, local politicians, and others extract payments from miners and traders. It does, however, provide employment for large numbers of people, primarily young men, in an area where traditional subsistence agriculture may not be desirable or even viable and where there are few other economic opportunities.

The Cabo Delgado province has the highest level of inequality and the worst economic indicators of anywhere in Mozambique (Hanlon Reference Hanlon2020). Most people are subsistence farmers, but rights to the subsoil supersede rights to farm on the surface. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of arable land have been conceded to mining companies.

Mining rubies on the company’s concession is illegal, but it offers a flash of hope to hungry and impoverished young men (and a few women as well). They might not leave a life of poverty and toil, but they might get a cell phone or a motorcycle or a few nights of revelry with money in their pockets. When I was in Montepuez, illegal mining and trading happened openly. There were occasional spasms of state violence but for the most part it was clear that the authorities were receiving their share of revenue from this illegal, but not illicit, activity.

Janet Roitman is at pains to point out the limitations of the idea of an “informal economy.” Illegal activities are quite formalized. State functionaries and elites are important participants. The illegal is embedded in everyday sociability, in governance, and in economic life (cf. Blundo et al. Reference Blundo, Olivier de Sardan, Arifari and Alou2008: 8, 87). Illegal activities, like those of Mozambique’s ruby miners, are thus licit and ethical (Roitman Reference Roitman2005: 182). Roitman shows how regulatory regimes can summon new categories of people into existence in order to subject them to taxation and regulation. This seems to have occurred in Mozambique as well. A group of young men with shovels and screens digging for gem-bearing gravel are transformed by legislative fiat into trespassers and criminals. Visitors from neighboring African countries with enough capital to buy them food while they dig become part of an international organized criminal network. When a state relinquishes its revenue to foreign capital through privatization, it renders itself unable to provide basic services for its citizens. This pushes economic activity to the untaxable frontier. This in turn means that civil servants, including the police, military, and customs officials, cannot be paid by the state. So they tax the illegal activity through bribery. Thus, the illegal economies become the main source for the creation of wealth. But these activities could never be certified as ethical or transparent.

Who Shall Certify the Certifier?

When I conducted this research in 2017, rubies and other colored gemstones had never been included within the purview of any certification organization. Their supply chains were deemed to be too complex, fragmented, and opaque. Early attempts to impose due diligence requirements on the colored gemstone sector were met with fierce opposition from the trade (Schorr Reference Schorr2015). This project unfolded in the midst of a concerted push by a jewelry certification organization to expand its standards to include colored gemstones. This push seems to have been led by the same UK-based mining company that extracts rubies from Mozambique. Its success has been mixed.

If the jewelry certification authority gains a firmer foothold in the fractious colored gemstone business, this would be to the advantage of the UK mining company. If membership in the certification organization became a prerequisite for access to jewelry markets, then suppliers who used the informal markets would be excluded (or would have to invent and document new origin stories for their material). Larger companies that work in the formal economy would have less competition.

This process, which is designed to bring responsibility and transparency to gemstone supply chains, may well end up benefiting a company that is alleged to have been responsible for egregious acts of violence against informal miners. It enhances the value of the rubies sold by the company and devalues the rubies sold by its competitors in global informal markets.

Where the Elephants Are

The techniques of transparent and responsible mining create a regime of coercive expertise. There is a tendency in the literature produced by international consultants and development agencies to depict people who mine gems illegally as the victims of unscrupulous middlemen who buy their goods cheaply and sell them for astronomical prices. It is true that cut and polished rubies sell for much higher prices in Bangkok than uncut stones do in informal transactions at night in a tea shop in Montepuez. It is equally true that a group of informal miners who manage to unearth a tiny chip of purplish stone can sell it for more than they would earn in a year of selling peanuts in the streets of Mocímboa da Praia.

The notion that you can hoodwink gemstone miners because they do not know the value of their own stones has been convincingly debunked by the gemologist Richard Hughes (Reference Hughes2014), but it continues to appear in the literature on responsible mining. It serves as a justification for the displacement of artisanal miners (for example) into the corporate social responsibility projects of multinational mining companies. Ignorance is selectively mobilized by those who have the most to gain from it. Michael Dove pointed to a similar trend in the studies of swidden agriculture in the tropics, where regulations that were purported to benefit shifting cultivators actually shifted the land they cultivated into the hands of large-scale plantations and timber extraction projects. He called this the “political economy of ignorance” (Dove Reference Dove1983: 85).

This criminalization begs another question: Why is digging for rubies illegal? Why should a government prohibit the practice of taking a shovel and digging a hole in the ground, hoping it will intersect with a channel of ruby-rich gravel? In fact, this was not illegal until 2014, when a new mining code came into force in Mozambique. That law made it explicitly illegal to conduct any artisanal or small-scale mining without a “senha mineira” or mining pass. Those passes are not impossible to obtain. It takes a couple of years and a lot of paperwork. But it would be functionally impossible for itinerant miners, illiterate in Portuguese, to get one. And even if you do have a “mining pass” or, say, legal title to farmland, those titles can be superseded by concessions granted to large-scale mines operated by foreign companies.

When I set out to understand who wrote the 2014 mining code for Mozambique, I learned something that made me feel hopelessly naïve. I thought that countries’ legislatures wrote their own laws. This is not the case. The World Bank funds a technical assistance project for the natural resources sector with a focus on oil and gas development. Ruby mining fell under its ambit. This project put out a tender for a company to write a new mining code for the country. That tender was bid on by a law firm that looked at what it deemed to be the best practices in mining law around the continent and elsewhere. It wrote a mining code that was subsequently adopted by the Mozambican legislature. This code created the mining pass system and thereby criminalized unlicensed mining.

I felt even more hopelessly naïve when I realized that similar processes had unfolded across Africa in the first decades of the twenty-first century. A World Bank push to formalize artisanal and small-scale mining led to the criminalization, illegalization, and informalization of miners across the continent and beyond (cf. Hilson Reference Hilson2017; Tschakert Reference Tschakert2009; Verbrugge Reference Verbrugge2015). Indeed, Africa seems to be entering into a “fourth generation” of mining codes. Rather than solely liberalizing and deregulating the mining sector to attract foreign direct investment, new codes focus on transparency and ecological protection (Besada and Martin Reference Besada and Martin2015). These goals seem laudable, but they enmesh small producers in a web of illegality. Perhaps this is part of their intention (Verbrugge Reference Verbrugge2015).

The World Bank project issued a second tender for a separate international consultancy to write the regulations to implement the new law as it relates to artisanal and small-scale mining. I met with the consultant who led the team that wrote those regulations. She has worked alongside artisanal miners over the course of a twenty-five-year career as a consultant in Africa. But even she acknowledged that the regulations she had developed could not work for artisanal miners. There was half a page of regulations about what kind of clothing you are supposed to wear. This is called PPE or personal protective equipment. These guys, she said, can barely afford their flip-flops. So they are stuck in a situation of illegality.

Laws crafted in conference rooms in the capital city of Maputo, or thousands of miles away in Europe, are implemented in frontier areas like Nampula or Cabo Delgado where they enter into a field of multiple overlapping and conflicting legal regimes.Footnote ⁴ Codes regulating people’s ability to dig into the ground under their feet attempt to replace simple systems with complex ones. They attempt to replace fluid structures with stable ones. But they can never quite work when rubies are a scant six meters from the surface. In this context, informal mining can be an important form of wealth creation and a dangerous activity to be violently extirpated at the same time.

Another group of consultants works on behalf of investors. The company in question was seeking to be listed on the London Stock Exchange. In order for a mining company to be listed, it needs to provide a “competent persons report.” This means that a company that is qualified as a “competent person” has assessed its operation and determined that there is a mineral resource where it intends to mine and that it is possible from a geological and regulatory perspective to mine it profitably. There have been many stock market scams in the mining business (see Tsing Reference Tsing2005: 56–71). The competent persons report is a mechanism to prevent them.

The competent persons report for the Montepuez ruby mine highlighted the presence of artisanal miners in two different sections. One was the section devoted to social and environmental risks. It pointed to the presence of artisanal miners as one of the biggest risks the company would face in its attempt to profit from the rubies on its concession. This has proven true.

The other section of the report that highlighted the presence of artisanal miners dealt with the size and richness of the mineral deposit that they were trying to exploit and the ease of access to it. The presence of people working illegally on the company’s concession was used as evidence that the deposit was large and easy to exploit.

There are no good geological indicators for gemstone deposits like this one. The stones occur here and there in beds of gravel under a few meters of alluvial soil. In a situation like this, the presence of people on a mining concession extracting the stones illegally is incontrovertible evidence of the presence of the stones themselves. As one consultant said to me, “You hunt elephants where the elephants are.” So miners working illegally are both the best indicator that you have an economically viable deposit and the biggest risk to your ability to exploit it.

The use of local miners as geological indicators for foreign industrial mining companies is nothing new. D’Avignon (Reference D’Avignon2018) showed how French army officers did the same thing in Afrique-Occidentale Française (French West Africa) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Colonial authorities would grant licenses to private companies that effectively excluded Africans from the mines that they had discovered and worked (D’Avignon Reference D’Avignon2018: 182). Sabine Luning (Reference Luning2014) describes a similar process in the goldfields of Burkina Faso. “Junior” mining companies look to attract funding from “major” mining companies by demonstrating the scale of the resource they hope to extract. The strongest indicator of scale is the number of “illegals” working it (Luning Reference Luning2014: 67). Through these processes, folk knowledge is transformed into corporate profit and the folks who generated it are recategorized as criminals. People have been hunting elephants where the elephants are for a long time.

The author of the social sections of these competent persons reports explained their methodology to me in an interview. I highlighted the fact that the report was written in 2015 when the company and state security forces were alleged to have been perpetrating some egregious acts of violence against these miners.

The person I spoke to holds a PhD in a social science discipline. But the report in question had been written by “the biodiversity person.” According to this logic, the adverse impacts on the people were equivalent to the impacts on the plants and animals in the mining area. I asked about where they get their data. It turns out that they get it from stakeholder engagement reports. These reports are written by the corporate social responsibility or community engagement staff, employed by the mine itself.

“Do you talk to anybody working around the mine?” She explained what the process of a site visit was like. You may have up to two days. One day is spent touring the mine and having it explained to you by the engineers. On the second day the mining community engagement people might drive you out to a village, in a mine vehicle, to talk to the villagers. Does someone speak Macua?Footnote ⁵ Portuguese? No. Who does the translation? Mining company staff. So your sociological information is collected by a biologist, who does not speak a local language, in the course of an hour-long visit to a community that has been selected and supervised by the mining company? I asked the questions as gently as I could.

She pointed out to me, just a bit tartly, “Mining companies don’t want to make the world a better place. They won’t do anything more than they have to do, but if they have to do it, they will.”

It is not the job of competent persons to make the world a better place either. They are doing due diligence for investors and banks or for the company itself. They ask if it is compliant with what it said it will do. This is based on the environmental and social management plan that they have entered into with the government. She told me that this is based on the EIA (environmental impact assessment), the ESIA (environmental and social impact assessment), or the ESHIA (environmental, social, and health impact assessment). Those assessments are the basis of the company’s agreement with the government. “Look,” she said. “I have a conscience. In terms of due diligence, it’s not about conscience, but obligation.” If a company can produce an ESHIA, then competent persons can certify their operations as ethical and profitable investments, regardless of what may be happening at the mine itself.

Conclusion

To sum up, a company that bills itself as the world’s leading supplier of responsibly sourced colored gemstones leads a process to force suppliers of colored gemstones to be certified as responsible at the same time as it is being accused of gross human rights violations at its most profitable mine. A consultancy that works on behalf of artisanal miners in development projects also provides intel to corporate clients looking to break up illegal artisanal mining operations around their concessions. The mining code of Mozambique, a document that explicitly underlines the importance of artisanal and small-scale mining to the development of the country, criminalizes artisanal mining and renders it impossible to do legally under the regulatory framework it imposes.

Digging for gems with a shovel and a sieve generally does not hurt anyone, except occasionally the people doing it. It may benefit the poor people who mine. But it is criminalized in the name of transparency, responsibility, and ethical mining. Artisanal mining connects miners to networks based on trust, debt, and kinship across the globe, linking them to gemstone hubs in India, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, and New York. These networks have functioned, more or less smoothly, for centuries. They do not, however, fit the newly emerging and ever-shifting criteria of transparency or traceability. The economic activities of some of the poorest people in the world are subject to violent repression in order to assuage the consciences of consumers who must be among the richest people in the world if they can afford to buy fine rubies.

Transparency is a technical claim that has been mistaken for an ethical claim.Footnote ⁶ Transparency is a way of knowing.Footnote ⁷ It is a way of producing documents that are legible to auditors. It is a technique for accounting. It is not about justice. Illegally mined rubies are enmeshed in intensely local and intensely global networks of debt and repayment, kinship and reciprocity, trust and mistrust across linguistic, religious, and national boundaries, from the moment they come out of the ground. They cannot be accounted for within the accounting regimes that constitute the technologies of transparency.

Transparency is an epistemology. It is not a metaphysic. People do honest and ethical business that is illegal and opaque, even when transparency is weaponized against them. This is similar to the relationship between relational accountability and audit-based accountability discussed by Walsh in this volume (Chapter 9). A set of mutually understood expectations govern the relations among diggers and their patrons, African buyers and Asian buyers, Asian buyers and their customers around the world. If these expectations are upheld then that international web of relationships can be maintained. It is mostly beneficial to all parties, even if it is not legible to the techniques of transparency.

Ballestero asks “if the more transparency one intends to create, the more obscure things become” (Reference Ballestero2012: 160). I’m not sure. But I think there is some ethnographic value in teasing out how these processes unfold, how the actions of multinational corporations, Bretton Woods institutions, and the consultancies they employ impinge on the lives of the kinds of people anthropologists traditionally study. As Rolph Trouillot wrote: “[P]ower itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots” (Trouillot Reference Trouillot2015: xix).