Jewelry Making

I came across an article on Business Week Online about Sri Lanka looking to up its already significant exports of gems and jewelry by more than 20 percent in this year. From the article:

Last year, Sri Lanka exported US$301 million (euro234.81 million) worth of gems and jewelry, making the industry the country’s fourth largest export earner after garments, tea and tourism.

That’s a lot of gems! Sri Lanka is known for being the country of origin of the famous 536 carat Star of India sapphire, but they’re also famous for various other gems including topaz, amethyst, moonstones, garnets, tourmalines, rubies and blue sapphires. This probably doesn’t mean anything for the average person buying stuff for jewelry making, but I have somewhat mixed feelings about foreign countries increasing their “production” of gems. It’s well known that there’s a lot of unfair procedures and practices hurting workers that go on in mining and producing gems in many places around the world so I won’t get into any moral aspects of that. If you make jewelry you need to decide for yourself how much you want to compromise using precious stones that may have come from certain places around the world where unfair labor practices are common.

Source:
Business Week Online
Sri Lanka to boost gem and jewelry export