Piyush Goyal, India’s commerce minister, said lab-grown diamonds should be treated as “equivalent to natural diamonds” in free trade agreement talks, IDEX Online reports.
Goyal spoke in Jaipur last week, ahead of two days of G20 trade and investment meetings. In a press conference, the high-ranking minister said: “[…] India is playing a big role in lab grown diamonds. A decision has been taken at a global level that lab grown diamonds are not artificial diamonds, they are not synthetic diamonds, they are equivalent to natural diamonds.”
Back in June, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi gifted US First Lady Jill Biden a lab grown diamond in a formal exchange of gifts at the White House. In February, India approved “an investment of almost $30 million over the next five years to establish and fund a center for lab grown diamonds.”
In other LGD-related news, the Natural Diamond Council (NDC) has recently urged a US online jewelry retailer, Agape Diamonds, to use appropriate terminology when describing the origin of its diamonds. Agape, based in Tampa, Florida, made some adjustments in response to the NDC’s challenge, but the changes did not fully satisfy the NDC. The matter was referred to the National Advertising Division (NAD), which concluded that some of Agape’s online advertising lacked clear and conspicuous disclosure of the stone’s origin.
