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Dark crystals: the brutal reality behind a booming wellness craze
The long read: Demand for ‘healing’ crystals is soaring – but many are mined in deadly conditions in one of the world’s poorest countries. And there is little evidence that this billion-dollar industry is cleaning up its act
www.theguardian.com
Where the magic woo-woo crystals so beloved by the Goopier end of the wellness industry come from, and the conditions in which they are mined.
Depressing reading (particularly so for people who suffer from claustrophobia, I would think)
Between the buyers in the US and the mines in Madagascar was a gulf of experience, which, sitting in the courtyard of Liva Marc’s small factory, he found hard to express. “It’s like two galaxies,” he said, grinning and shaking his head. “It’s a big difference. If I say to people at the mine what Tuscon is like, they will never understand. And if I say to the Tucson people to come here, they will never understand. It’s very different worlds.”
He acknowledged the poor conditions at the mines he bought from. “You were shocked, but I was shocked, too! When you see in the rough, [stones weighing] like 50kg, 60kg, they drag it four, five kilometres, two or three per day, and earning only $1? You know, it’s … ” He paused. “Sometimes you can’t imagine how they can do this.”
[....]
“Maybe they [shops in the US] don’t explain it to their customers. It’s business for them, they want money. They will never say: ‘I buy this for $1 and I sell to you for $1,000’,” he laughed, “but that’s the reality.”
The plunder of Madagascar’s resources for profit is nothing new. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the country was a source of slaves, bought by Europeans and sent to work in brutal conditions, often on sugar plantations on the islands of Mauritius, Réunion and Rodrigues. When the French colonised Madagascar in 1895, they outlawed slavery, but ushered in a new era of forced labour and extraction, with tens of thousands of tonnes of rosewood and millions of francs’ worth of gold shipped offshore each year. More than a century later, the country’s riches still rarely benefit the Malagasy people, says Zo Andriamaro, a sociologist and human rights analyst. Gold, cobalt, sapphires, crystals: she sees them all as part of the same old story, resources siphoned out of the country for the benefit of foreign companies. “There has to be some more systematic way of controlling and regulating the market for all types of minerals coming from here,” she says. “It is totally unjust.”