When Leonardo DiCaprio’s new motion picture Blood Diamond opens worldwide in December, all eyes are sure to be on the African diamond trade. The film focuses on devastating civil war in the West African nation of Sierra Leone in the 1990s, when the sale of so-called “conflict diamonds” financed at least some of the rebel fighting that killed more than 75,000 people. In the minds of many people, African diamonds are still associated with warfare, corruption and poverty, and certainly the DiCaprio film will do nothing to change that. But the film portrays historical events that both African government and diamond industry spokesmen claim are long past. They also argue that in this brave new world of the 21st century, diamonds can be a force for good — and have been for decades in places like Botswana.

In a recent speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Botswana’s Foreign Minister, Lieutenant General Mompati S. Merafhe, pointed to the good that the diamond industry has done for his country in the past forty years. This is no idle boast: the per-capita income for the average Botswanan has increased more than 120-fold since the 1960s, a growth rate that far outstrips those seen even in the developed world. The Botswana government also uses income from diamonds (equal to roughly 30% of its Gross Domestic Product) to improve and maintain the nation’s infrastructure, to provide health care and education to its people, and to give them drinkable water.

All this, Merafhe pointed out, could be the fate of any country that follows Botswana’s lead in entering into a cooperative, mutually beneficial relationship with the worldwide diamond industry. Considering that 65% of the world’s rough diamonds come from Africa, those glittery stones have the potential to drive a significant amount of positive change in the lives of people throughout the continent. Diamond development could also help less-developed nations eliminate the need for both loans and debt relief, and redress the massive trade imbalance that helps keep them poor.

Though some fear a reprise of the diamond-financed civil strife that has torn apart Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo in the last two decades, that seems unlikely to happen, if only because diamonds are so much more tightly controlled these days. In his address to the UN, Merafhe sang the praises of the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme, a voluntary group in which governments, private industry, and other organizations worldwide work together to keep blood diamonds out of the marketplace and to ensure that the diamond industry maintains its integrity. Botswana currently holds the Secretariat and Chair of the organization. The certification process the Kimberly Process employs basically follows diamonds from the ground all the way to the jewelry store, and since the institution of the process three years ago, the percentage of blood diamonds entering circulation has dropped nearly to zero. The Kimberly Process isn’t limited to Africa — in fact, it includes the European Union, the United States, and many other nations, and its participants control about 99.8% of all the diamonds in the world.