# A Rough Trade > [!note] 📄 Non-governmental report > Published by [[Global Witness]], an independent investigative NGO. [[Global Witness]], *A Rough Trade: The Role of Companies and Governments in the Angolan Conflict*, **December 1998**. The founding document of the entire conflict-resource field. Everything downstream — the [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]], [[Dodd-Frank Section 1502]], the [[OECD Due Diligence Guidance]] — descends from a report by a five-year-old London NGO about Angolan diamonds. ## What it claimed That diamonds were UNITA's principal revenue source through the 1990s, yielding **an estimated $3.7 billion between 1992 and 1998**; that UNITA had consistently controlled 60–70% of Angolan diamond production since 1992; and that governments were breaching the UN embargo while the trade's opacity shielded companies from accountability. The conceptual move that mattered was not the number. It was **relocating responsibility from the battlefield to the point of purchase** — arguing that a company buying rough diamonds in Antwerp was implicated in a war in Angola. That relocation is what made supply-chain regulation thinkable. ## The $3.7 billion figure — how it was actually built > [!warning] The number is a sum of annual estimates, not a model or an audit > The breakdown circulating at the time: 1992 $600m · 1993 $600m · 1994 $600m · 1995 $320m · 1996 $700m · 1997 $700m · 1998 $200m — totalling about **$3.72 billion**, and described as a *minimum*. > > The report itself concedes the income "is impossible to record with absolute precision but it can be approximated." **No methodology annex was published.** The inputs were industry and trade sources and confidential interviews, with identities withheld. > > The **Fowler Report** then hardened it into "$3.72 billion, or 93% of all diamond sales," and press variants ran to $4 billion. That is how an NGO estimate with undisclosed inputs became a UN finding. See [[Fowler Report]]. ## What it produced UN Security Council Resolution 1173 had imposed the first diamond embargo six months earlier; *A Rough Trade* supplied the campaign that turned an embargo into a certification regime. It fed directly into the Fowler Panel, the May 2000 Kimberley meeting, UN General Assembly Resolution 55/56, and the KPCS agreed at Interlaken in November 2002. It also established Global Witness's method, which the organisation has run ever since: **compare what a country exports against what it can plausibly produce.** That method is [[E. D. Morel]]'s from 1901, and it recurs in the [[Fowler Report]], in *[[The Heart of the Matter]]*, and in the 2026 investigation of Rwandan coltan. ## See also [[Blood Diamonds]] · [[Global Witness]] · [[Fowler Report]] · [[The Heart of the Matter]] · [[Kimberley Process Certification Scheme]] · [[Conflict Minerals Hub]]