The pit, less than four metres deep and ever-growing in diameter, put all the gemstone buyers working for the major jewellery houses on alert. The unofficial sapphire mine, excavated a few months ago near the village of Ambarazy, in the commune of Ilakakabe in southern Madagascar, near a road linking Tuléar to the capital Antananarivo, has been flooded with thousands of "independent" miners working in precarious conditions and outside any legal framework.
Previously, there were only two industrial
