Diamond attention shifts to Botswana

Brian Benza
Staff Writer | Friday November 9, 2007 00:00

In an interview with Mineweb, the Managing Director of Tawana, Wolf Marx, said Botswana is one of the lowest-risk countries in the world for exploration and mining and foreign investment.

'There had been a distinct shift in the attention of global diamond investors away from places like Canada and Australia towards Botswana,' Marx said. 'The success rate in finding commercially viable diamond deposits is second to none, and that includes junior explorers who have had quite spectacular successes. 'So I think there will be renewed attention on Tawana and certainly we'll be pursuing the Orapa Project in Botswana and our other Southern African projects very vigorously.'In a global competitiveness report released last week by the World Economic Forum, Botswana received its highest ranking in the institutions category which included factors such as legal framework, corruption, dishonesty and property rights.

In a quarterly update released two weeks ago, Tawana said preliminary interpretations of ground-based gravity and magnetic surveys at its 100 percent-owned Orapa Project suggested that kimberlites were 'larger in surface areas than previously thought'.

The company said drilling to verify this interpretation had started and that drill cuttings from the kimberlites would be transported to Kimberley in South Africa for analysis and diamond recovery. Tawana has also started a programme of evaluation which will consist of detailed geophysics, trenching and drilling to establish the size and nature of the kimberlites, followed by bulk sampling to determine the grade and diamond quality.

The company was granted a prospecting licence over the 57-square kilometre area covering eight kimberlites in the Orapa kimberlite field in April this year. Marx added that the gap between the demand for and the supply of diamonds is set to widen from 2008, thanks mainly to a surging demand in India and China. It is estimated that the size of the diamond-consuming market in the two Asian countries will grow from 33 million consumers to 65 million consumers by 2015. Mining analysts expect the world's largest diamond producer in value terms, Botswana, to forego at least US$460 million  in potential revenue from the diamond industry as the gap between demand and supply of the precious stone continue to widen, leading to supply constraints.

Russia will forego US$260 million while South Africa will lose a potential US$160 million between 2005-2015. It is estimated that 40 percent of women from the 1.32 billion population of China are now getting married with diamond rings, and that trend is expected to increase significantly over the coming years.