{"id":691365,"date":"2026-07-14T15:45:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T15:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/691365\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T15:45:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T15:45:09","slug":"de-beers-halts-diamond-production-at-flagship-south-african-mine-for-two-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/691365\/","title":{"rendered":"De Beers halts diamond production at flagship South African mine for two years"},"content":{"rendered":"

Workers’ unions have previously warned against job losses in South Africa’s mining sector, which employs almost half a million people, external<\/a> and accounts for more than 4% of national GDP, external<\/a>.<\/p>\n

De Beers is majority-owned by Anglo American, which is reportedly trying to sell it and shift focus to the growing copper market, external<\/a> fuelled by the recent AI boom.<\/p>\n

At the Venetia mine, De Beers has pledged to use those two years of downtime to make infrastructure more “efficient” with increased “capacity”, external<\/a>, ready to reopen production once market conditions improve.<\/p>\n

Times remain tough across the industry, which has seen the International Diamond Consultants’ rough diamond price index almost halve since 2022.<\/p>\n

Lab-grown diamonds have gained in popularity in recent years, as consumers voice ethical concerns about miners’ pay and working conditions as well as environmental damage.<\/p>\n

Yet De Beers and other established firms have cashed in on those industry changes too, producing their own lab-grown versions at a snip of the price one would pay for natural diamonds.<\/p>\n

De Beers is not the first large producer to scale down operations in recent years, but it does occupy a particular place in the public imagination owing to its long history dating back to 1871.<\/p>\n

Its founder was Cecil Rhodes, the English colonist whose forces dispossessed indigenous Africans of their land and denied them basic rights.<\/p>\n

He became a millionaire in the process and justified their disenfranchisement and racial segregation, external<\/a> to Cape Town’s Parliament several years later, saying “the natives are children… they are just emerging from barbarism, external<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

His legacy in southern Africa has become a lightning rod for discussions about “decolonising” institutions which continue to bear his name.<\/p>\n

This includes those that have statues of him and scholarships founded on his enormous wealth – like the UK’s University of Oxford, whose past Rhodes Scholars, external<\/a> include ex-US President Bill Clinton and former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Workers’ unions have previously warned against job losses in South Africa’s mining sector, which employs almost half a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":691366,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-691365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=691365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/691365\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/691366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=691365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=691365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=691365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}