19 Feb Ethics, Traceability and Who Gets Left Behind – By Alan Cohen

Ethics, Traceability and Who Gets Left Behind Martin Rapaport has stepped down from RapNet and is launching a new platform built around fully tracked diamonds. On the face of it, the aim is hard to argue with: promoting natural diamonds that are responsibly and ethically sourced.

I’m entirely in favour of that. I always have been.

But there’s a problem with how this is being framed and it’s a big one.

What’s being created here isn’t a divide between ethical and unethical diamonds. It’s a divide between those who can afford to participate in expensive, end-to-end traceability systems and those who can’t. In other words, the haves and the have-nots. These systems scanning at the mine, blockchain records, repeated matching through manufacturing and grading — are only realistically available to large, well-capitalised players. They do nothing for the artisanal and small-scale sector, which still underpins diamond production across much of Africa and beyond. Worse, they risk quietly pushing that sector to the margins by implication rather than by fact, reviving the familiar assumption that informality is synonymous with illegitimacy.

This is where desirability bias creeps in. As “tracked” becomes the fashionable shorthand for “ethical”, anything untracked is left looking suspect by default. That may be comforting from a marketing point of view, but it doesn’t reflect how the diamond trade has actually worked.

For decades, diamonds have been ethically sourced under legal and regulatoryframeworks without needing stone-by-stone tracking. Ethics has meant lawfulproduction, legitimate ownership, proper export controls, and financial transparency, not access to proprietary technology. There’s also a certain irony here. Long before today’s renewed enthusiasm for blockchain, the world’s largest diamond producer was already providing traceability data linking polished diamonds back to specific sources. In practice, buyers could demonstrate the journey from rough to finished stone years before traceability became a marketing differentiator. Traceability is not new and it has never been a guarantee of ethical superiority.

The danger is that we end up creating a two-tier market: diamonds that come with a moral badge attached, and diamonds that don’t regardless of how responsibly they were actually mined and traded. That might make for a neat story, but it risks excluding the very producers the industry claims to care most about.

It is often argued that participation in such platforms is optional that those who do not wish to use them are free to opt out. In theory, that is correct. In practice, desirability bias does the rest. Once a particular model is publicly positioned as the ethical benchmark, research, reporting and consumer messaging begin to align around it. At that point, it stops being about exclusion and starts looking like ethical rent-seeking. Moral legitimacybecomes something you can buy into, rather than something you earn through how you actually operate. Ethics shifts from behaviour to branding. It’s a powerful handle, almost as good as the claim that synthetics are the only ‘green’ alternative, and like that story it is more spin than reality.

There is a second, less discussed aspect of desirability bias at work here as well. People tend to see in surveys, studies and articles what they already expect to find. Evidence that supports the preferred narrative is amplified; evidence that complicates it is discounted. The result can be a false sense of consensus, reassuring, coherent, and sometimes badly wrong.

When ethics are defined by access to technology rather than behaviour on the ground, the industry isn’t becoming more responsible, it’s just becoming more exclusive. And it’s worth saying this plainly: there is no such thing as a good or a bad diamond only good or bad people who sell them.