What will happen to Botswana as the diamonds run out?

The studies also look at what needs to be done in the coming years. Some of the predictions regarding the decline in mining revenues and resultant decline in living standards need to be confronted for the nation to advance.

There is increasing concern about what will become of Botswana as the diamonds are depleted. Unfortunately there has been much hype about the fact that diamond mining  is almost certainly likely to continue in the country until 2050. Botswana has been blessed by the discovery of diamonds slightly after independence. At first the Orapa mine was discovered and developed after 1966 which produced extremely large volumes of diamonds that has not been seen since the main discoveries in Russia and even as far back as the discoveries in the Kimberly a century before. Orapa remains prolific as it is a very low cost mine. The only problem was that the mine produced a very high concentration of industrial diamonds which are relatively low value. Approximately half of Orapa’s output was industrial diamonds.