GENERAL SURVEY

It will be seen from this brief review that there is considerable imbalance in connection with Diamond sources. Strategic minerals such as iron, coal, copper, tin, oil, and so on, have fairly world-wide distribution. Diamonds are closely localised, mostly in Africa (and perhaps the U.S.S.R.). Excluding the U.S.S.R., virtually all the important industrial nations have none or virtually negligible sources of supply. A quite rough guide of world output (excluding the U.S.S.R., of which nothing exact is really known) is shown in Table 1.

Between them these seven sources, all in Africa, produce some 5 tons of Diamond (or maybe 5½ tons), whilst a further ten sources produce, between them, maybe another I½ to 2 tons. Apart from about one-third of a million carats from Brazil, almost all the rest comes from Africa too. Some estimates have placed present Russian output as about one million carats, or even double that, but this is guesswork so far. The difficulties of exploitation in the Yakutsk are great. In the long winter the temperature there goes down to —70° F; in the short summer it exceeds 100° F.

The region covers over a million square miles, with a thinly spread population of about half a million people. Communications are extremely poor. There is no indigenous industry, no local coal. But if this area were to be really fully developed, the repercussions on the world situation regarding Diamonds could be formidable. Russia is now the only great industrial power completely independent of the African continent for its Diamond supplies for techno­logical purposes.