CaratGuyana's diggers choose gold: diamond exports fall 70 to 80 percent
The same dredges that wash diamonds wash gold — and with bullion having doubled in three years while small-parcel rough fell by half, Guyana's alluvial miners have switched. First-half diamond exports collapsed 70 to 80 percent year on year.
The supply discipline this page has tracked all summer — Severalmaz suspended, Kao mothballed, Finsch in rescue, Venetia switched off for two years — has mostly been a story of boardrooms choosing to withhold carats. IDEX's reporting from Guyana describes the same contraction arriving by an older mechanism: the diggers themselves walking away. The country's diamond exports fell 70 to 80 percent year on year in the first half of 2026, a collapse one exporter, Ronnie Grouper, called drastic — Guyana, he said, has never experienced such a decrease.
The economics require no committee. Alluvial diamond and gold deposits sit side by side in Guyana's interior, and the equipment — dredges, sluices, the same crews — works either gravel. Gold has roughly doubled in three years and closed Tuesday at $4,072; prices for the small rough parcels that are Guyana's stock in trade have fallen by more than half over the same period. A miner choosing between the two is not making a bet on geology; he is reading two price boards nailed to the same tree.
Guyana's production profile explains why it moved first. Some 85 percent of the country's rough value sits in stones of half a carat and smaller — a typical thousand-carat parcel contains just six to ten stones above two carats. That is precisely the small-goods category that spent two years in the deepest hole, and although the RapNet 0.30-carat index has now risen for consecutive months, the recovery arrived after the workforce had already re-rigged for gold.
The wider point is structural. Corporate mines can be restarted with a capital allocation; artisanal and small-scale supply, once dispersed into another commodity, returns slowly if at all — the crews re-tool, the buyers' networks atrophy, the licenses lapse. Angola and the DRC watch the same gold price Guyana does. The rough market's recovering small-stone segment is, quietly, losing a marginal supplier at exactly the moment demand for its goods firmed.
The desk's view: every bullish argument for natural rough this year has been an argument about subtraction, and this is subtraction with a long memory. When the cycle turns and buyers come looking for the small goods Guyana used to wash, the dredges will be a season deep in gold gravel and disinclined to move. Supply lost to price comes back; supply lost to a rival commodity at record levels is closer to permanent. The 0.30-carat index just found one more reason to keep climbing.