My First World Diamond Congress, Part One

I’ll admit I didn’t quite know what to expect walking into the 41st World Diamond Congress in Singapore. First time at one of these, and there was something almost electric about the opening session — this was the first Congress ever open to outside observers, and you could feel the room knew it was a bit of a historic moment. The Atrium Ballroom at Marina Bay’s Park Collection Hotel was packed, somewhere around 300 delegates, observers, and guests, and it felt like everyone in the industry had shown up.

Fabio Cascapera, Chair of the Congress Organising Committee and President of the Diamond Exchange of Singapore, opened things by reminding the room that the last time the Congress was held in Singapore was 1988 — the 24th edition. He’d been a young man then, full of confidence in the industry’s future, and hearing him reflect on everything that’s changed since, while still clearly just as in love with diamonds, was a nice way to start the day. He had a message for the younger generation in the room: don’t let anyone discourage you. As someone new to all this, I appreciated that it wasn’t lost on him that people like me were in the audience.

There was a quiet moment of condolence for the Qatari delegation, and then Cascapera told the story behind the congress’s theme, “Thanks to Diamonds.” He’d been at a presidents’ meeting in New York the year before, he said, where Botswana’s president said “thanks to diamonds” five times over — thanks to diamonds Botswana has hospitals, thanks to diamonds Botswana has homes, thanks to diamonds Botswana has schools and can send its children to university.

And then, Cascapera said with a grin of his own, the president added: in Botswana, they only have natural diamonds.

It got a genuine laugh in the room, but it also landed — a head of state making the case for natural diamonds in a single, funny, disarming line — and it set exactly the tone the rest of the day would build on.

Outgoing WFDB President Yoram Dvash took a moment to thank Cascapera and the Singapore team, marveling that a bourse as small as Singapore’s had managed to pull off an event this size. Then he walked through his six years leading the Federation — COVID, sanctions, the synthetic diamond wave — and you got a real sense of how much this industry has had to absorb and still hold together. The Get Diamond platform moving $6B in value, the vaccine shipments to India during COVID through the Dynamite Project, successfully pushing back a G7 proposal on Russian diamond sanctions verification — it was a lot to take in as a first-timer, and I found myself scribbling notes just trying to keep up.

The Line of the Day

Then Ronnie VanderLinden, President of both IDMA and the World Diamond Council, got up and gave what ended up being the line of the day for me. He talked about how Singapore’s identity as a global crossroads mirrors the industry itself — brilliance, precision, connection all coming together in one place. But then he got right to it: over the past twenty years, he said, the industry did the hard work of improving standards, strengthening consumer confidence, and protecting the integrity of the product — and it should be proud of that.

But somewhere along the way, it forgot how to create desire.

It got focused on explaining and defending and proving what natural diamonds are, and stopped making people want them. Nothing’s wrong with the product, he said — the problem is the industry stopped telling the story in a way that creates desire. That one idea ended up being the thread that ran through literally everything I heard for the rest of the day, even in sessions that had nothing to do with marketing.

Voices from the Producing Nations

Two African government ministers spoke next, and this was the part of the opening I hadn’t expected to hit me as hard as it did. Botswana’s Minister of Minerals and Energy, Bogolo Joy Kenewendo, and Angola’s Secretary of State for Mining, Jânio da Rosa Corrêa Victor, both invited the room to come visit and invest in their countries directly.

Kenewendo’s speech in particular stayed with me — she said the real question facing the industry isn’t whether natural diamonds will survive, because they will. The real question is whether they’ll still matter to future generations, and she argued that comes down to whether the industry tells its story with confidence, embraces transparency instead of fearing it, and understands that today’s consumers are choosing identities and values, not just products. She sounded genuinely optimistic, pointing out that the industry already has something most industries spend years chasing and never fully get: authenticity, history, a story that’s billions of years old and still unfinished.

Into the Producer Story

From there I went to the African leadership session, which was the one I’d been most looking forward to — I wanted to understand the producer side, not just the trade side. And it delivered. Hearing Botswana’s transformation laid out, from one of the poorest countries in the world in 1966 to a diamond economy with an $80B stock market, was genuinely inspiring. De Beers committing $1B a year for ten years to a Diamonds for Development Fund. Two technical universities in Angola built from diamond revenue. I hadn’t appreciated how much infrastructure — literal universities, literal banking systems — has been built on the back of this industry.

What surprised me most in that room was Dubai. I had no idea 80–90% of Angola’s diamond trade now runs through DMCC, up from about 20%. That’s the kind of shift you don’t see coming if you’re new to this. And the panel was refreshingly honest about the industry’s biggest weakness: everyone still associates African diamonds with “Blood Diamond,” a film from 2006, and the industry has done real development work since but has just been bad at telling anyone about it. One panelist’s line stuck with me — the most credible messengers aren’t corporations, they’re the citizens actually working in the industry. I left that session wanting to hear more from the people actually on the ground, not just the executives.

A Reality Check in the Afternoon

By the afternoon I made it to the Asian market session, and this is where things got a bit more sobering after an inspiring morning. The China numbers were a lot starker than I expected — diamond’s share of jewelry revenue down 60% over five years, marriages dropping from over 10 million couples a year to under 6 million. Meanwhile gold-set-with-diamond jewelry doubled. It was a good reality check after a day of big, hopeful numbers — this is genuinely a hard consumer environment, not just a storytelling exercise.

What I found fascinating was how differently China and India are handling the natural-versus-synthetic split. China’s basically drawn a hard legal line — separate stores, separate declarations, laws that criminalize misdeclaration. India’s leaning on trust instead, with buyback guarantees doing a lot of the work. Two completely different philosophies solving the same problem, and I hadn’t thought about it that way before.

End of Day One

By the end of the day, I kept coming back to Cascapera’s story and VanderLinden’s line. Everywhere I went — Kenewendo’s call for confident storytelling, Africa’s narrative gap, China’s shrinking category — it was the same underlying problem wearing a different costume. Nobody in that building was short on data or infrastructure. What was missing was that spark of desire that used to make a president stand up in front of his peers and just say it plainly: thanks to diamonds.

Genuinely couldn’t wait to see where Day 2 goes.