Lab-Grown Diamonds Are Destroying Economies. Is That Okay?

By Rob Bates | January 13, 2026

I was recently talking with a friend about Alexander Lacik, who stepped down as CEO of Pandora at the end of the year. We both agreed he’d done an excellent job. “Well,” I added, “except for hurting the economy of Botswana.”

I was joking. Kind of.

In 2021, Pandora garnered tons of publicity when it said it would no longer sell jewelry with mined diamonds—despite the fact it rarely used them in the first place. Afterward, Lacik told the BBC that adopting lab-grown diamonds was “the right thing do” and would leave the world in “a better shape.” Bloomberg proclaimed that Pandora was taking an “ethical stand.”

We’ve grown used to hearing this kind of rhetoric from lab-grown diamond sellers. They regularly bill their product as “more ethical” and claim that buying lab-grown diamonds will “help the world.”

And yet when we look at the actual effects lab-growns are having on places that depend on diamonds—in particular Botswana, whose economy was once the envy of Africa—it’ s hard to consider anything that’s happening good for humanity. Last summer, news outlet Semafor reported:

Botswana’s President Duma Boko declared a public health emergency because of a shortage of essential medicines and medical equipment.

The economy in the world’s top diamond producer by value has been hit by a downturn in the precious stone’s international market.…

The announcement follows a warning by the health ministry this month that it faced a shortage of medical supplies and owed around $75 million to private health facilities and suppliers.

What does the country’s public health emergency look like in practice? This:

At Princess Marina Hospital in Gaborone—once the crown jewel of Botswana’s public health system—the reality of the crisis is inescapable. The cancer ward operates without chemotherapy drugs. The emergency department lacks morphine. Diabetic patients share insulin when it’s available at all. The hospital’s main CT scanner has been broken since March 2025.

“We are witnessing the systematic collapse of everything we built,” says a senior physician at the hospital who requested anonymity. “Patients who would have survived five years ago are dying from preventable conditions.”

Plus there’s the impact on downsized workers:

“I have debts and I don’t know how I am going to pay them,” said a [laid-off mine worker in Botswana], who had survived on about $300 a month and relied on her employer for medical insurance. It had been a decent situation for a semi-skilled worker in a country where the average monthly salary is about $500. “Every month they call me asking for money. But where do I get it?”…

“I was the breadwinner in a big family,” she said. “Now I don’t even know how to feed my own.”

The drop in natural diamond sales has also hurt the economies of Namibia and Lesotho.

In Canada’s Northwest Territories, where diamond mines are a major employer of Indigenous people, the economy is now reportedly in a “death spiral”:

Diamonds make up most of the territory’s own-source revenue, said N.W.T. Finance Minister Caroline Wawzonek, who is also responsible for the territorial power corporation, strategic infrastructure, energy and supply chains….

“It’s not really a story of ‘Do I think our government is going to be in financial trouble’—not exactly,” Wawzonek said.

“Do I think the economy here will be in financial trouble? I would say that’s our real risk.”

Is all this due to lab-grown diamonds? The people selling lab-growns have repeatedly boasted about the damage they’re doing to the natural diamond business. In 2023, Martin Roscheisen, CEO of lab-grown producer Diamond Foundry, told Forbes, “We plan to replace all of diamond mining in five years.”

But it’s not just people in mining areas who are affected. In India, the increased prevalence of lab-grown has been linked to lower wages as well as “massive layoffs” in the diamond-cutting trade, which—along with tariffs and sanctions—helped lead to more than 70 suicides among cutters in a year and a half.

The sad thing is this was predictable. In 2006, Nelson Mandela warned that any shunning of mined diamonds could “result in the destabilization of African diamond-producing countries and, ultimately, their peoples.” In my 2016 open letter to Leonardo DiCaprio (a backer of Diamond Foundry), I wrote that the end of the natural diamond business would mean “the people dependent on the mining industry in some of the poorest countries in the world will be thrown out of work.” I am extremely unhappy to have been proved correct.

The lab-grown industry has occasionally faced questions about its impact on on mining communities, though I have yet to hear a convincing response. When the BBC asked Lacik about it in 2023, he said:

We have, through human history, been faced with technology leaps. We went from horses to cars, now we’re talking about electric cars.… And of course, each time such a technology leap happens, there will be an impact on the old way of doing things.

“Impact on the old way of doing things” is a pretty bland euphemism for putting a blowtorch to a once-thriving economy. (It’s also the excuse we keep hearing in favor of AI.) And Lacik, who always struck me as a decent person, later said he wasn’t out to destroy the natural diamond business.

Even so, that comment reminds me of this:

In February 2018, a 61-year-old livery driver shot himself in front of City Hall in lower Manhattan, claiming he’d lost his livelihood because of competition from Uber cars.

“I will forever remember the reaction of two of my friends working at Uber at the time,” says [Maëlle Gavet, author of Trampled by Unicorns: Big Tech’s Empathy Problem and How to Fix It]. “During a dinner party, I asked how they felt about the suicide, and they were both like, ‘It’s sad, but it’s the cost of disruption.’”

It’s an excuse she’s heard repeatedly. “I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard people in Silicon Valley dismiss something horrible they may have caused with ‘That’s the cost of disruption,’” she says. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, it’s awful, but we’re trying to make the world a better place, so it’s OK.’”

I understand how the “lab-grown diamonds are more ethical” narrative came about—the natural diamond industry had serious issues in the past, which haven’t completely gone away. Still, not all diamonds are blood diamonds, as Mandela and Ed Zwick, the director of Blood Diamond, both said repeatedly. The mines in Canada and Botswana are unionized and pay fair wages to their workers. I recommend that anyone buying a natural gem ask for proof it came from a respected producer, such as Botswana, Namibia, or Canada.

Lab-grown brands also call themselves eco-friendly, though just about every grower has been reluctant to provide information on their actual impact. Like all manufactured products, lab-grown diamonds have their share of environmental and labor issues. Some have even been linked to the Chinese military.

People buy lab-growns for many reasons—primarily because they’re cheaper. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with selling or buying them.

I just ask one thing of my friends in the lab-grown industry: Don’t say your business will lead to a better world, especially given the harm it’s currently causing. That not only comes across as callous, it is, in my view, dishonest. And dishonesty is never ethical.

(Photo: Getty Images)