Mining giant De Beers is suspending production at South Africa's biggest diamond mine for two years, as changing consumer habits continue to shrink profits.

Prices across the industry have fallen because fewer people are buying diamonds than in the past, especially in China, and there is stiff competition from much cheaper lab-grown gems.

Announcing its decision to close the Venetia mine, De Beers said it needed to cut costs and streamline operations given the depressed state of the world diamond market. 

The Venetia mine, in the far north of South Africa, accounts for more than 40% of the country's diamond production and employs more than 4,000 people.

Workers' unions have previously warned against job losses in South Africa's mining sector, which employs almost half a million people and accounts for more than 4% of national GDP.

De Beers is majority-owned by Anglo American, which is reportedly trying to sell it and shift focus to the growing copper market fuelled by the recent AI boom.

At the Venetia mine, De Beers has pledged to use those two years of downtime to make infrastructure more "efficient" with increased "capacity", ready to reopen production once market conditions improve.

De Beers famously launched the advertising tagline "A Diamond is Forever" in 1947,seeking to cement the idea that a diamond ring was an essential part of getting married, and later inspiring a James Bond novel and the song recorded by Shirley Bassey for the film franchise.

But consumer habits have since changed and times are now tough across the industry, which has seen the International Diamond Consultants' rough diamond price index almost halve since 2022.

Lab-grown diamonds have gained in popularity in recent years, as consumers voice ethical concerns about miners' pay and working conditions as well as environmental damage.

Yet De Beers and other established firms have cashed in on those industry changes too, producing their own lab-grown versions at a snip of the price one would pay for natural diamonds.

De Beers is not the first large producer to scale down operations in recent years, but it does occupy a particular place in the public imagination owing to its long history dating back to 1871.

Its founder was Cecil Rhodes, the English colonist whose forces dispossessed indigenous Africans of their land and denied them basic rights.

He became a millionaire in the process and justified their disenfranchisement and racial segregation to Cape Town's Parliament several years later, saying "the natives are children... they are just emerging from barbarism".

His legacy in southern Africa has become a lightning rod for discussions about "decolonising" institutions which continue to bear his name.

This includes universities that have statues of him and scholarships founded on his enormous wealth - like the UK's University of Oxford, whose past Rhodes Scholarsinclude ex-US President Bill Clinton and former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.