The true values ​​of a sapphireIn today's globalized world, relations between distant nations have grown significantly. Events that occur on one side of the world can be known and even affect a country on the other side. These relationships also make it possible to expand into different countries and acquire natural resources on a global scale. In the gem industry, Madagascar is widely renowned for the abundance of sapphires that can be found in Ankarana National Park (Walsh 2005: 660). Although sapphires are valued worldwide as a gemstone, the values ​​of sapphires are different from those in Madagascar. Sapphires mined from Ankarana National Park have acquired both economic and aesthetic values ​​in a globalized world thanks to the Malagasy miners who extract them from the park, the foreign buyers who sell them to the rest of the world, and the consumers who buy them. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essayThe values ​​of sapphires from Madagascar are obtained for the first time in Ankarana National Park. While ecotourists come from far and wide to discover the caves, tingsy, 330 known plant species and more than 100 animal species that find their habitat in the park, thousands of Malagasy migrant miners use the park to illegally dig for sapphires (Walsh 2012: xviii). -xix). From 1996, when foreign buyers of gemstones arrived in Ambondromifehy, the local sapphire trade attracted many Malagasy migrants to the region (2004: 228). The sapphire boom gave many Malagasy prospectors the opportunity to profit as these foreign buyers offered money for the sapphires (2012: 14). This rush of migrant workers is similar to that of men and women who lived and moved to rural Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s (Soto Lavega 2005: 749). There, Mexican migrants were desperate for barbasco, a Mexican yam, which at the time was the best raw material for pharmaceutical technology and chemical advancements in the world of medicines (2005:744). Syntex, a Mexican company dedicated to industrialization and progesterone production, began paying Mexican villagers to enter the jungle to extract barbasco from the ground (2005:749-750). In both cases, the inhabitants of each nation were paid to extract the desired object from the ground, giving these objects economic value, which they did not previously have. Before the exchange value that sapphires and barbasco had acquired, Malagasy and Mexican villagers had no use for what they extracted. In Madagascar, the only people in the region who valued sapphires before the arrival of foreign buyers were children who used them as ammunition in slingshots (Walsh 2012: 23), while in Mexico barbasco was known as a poison to fish and like a weed. it was found in the corn fields until foreigners came to “teach” the local population the commercial value it had in the global economy (Soto Laveaga 2005: 753). While the economic value of sapphires attracted so many people to join the Ankarana sapphire rush in the late 1990s, many people were “taking risks” (Walsh 2012: 25). According to Andrew Walsh, taking risks was knowingly investing time and effort into something that might not ultimately pay off. This was true formany Malagasy people, who moved to Ambondromifehy from other parts of Madagascar with almost nothing and no information or contact about illegal mining inside Ankarana National Park (2012: 25). Once they began working, miners acted boldly and entered unstable pits, crossed chasms in caves, defied police intentions to keep them out of the park, and transgressed local or inherited taboos. without regard for potential consequences, which included arrest, serious injury, and death (2012:26). These types of market externalities are common when extracting a natural resource. In Mexico, thorns and snakes in the jungle made finding barbasco very difficult and injuries were common (Soto Laveaga 2005: 751). While there were so many risks involved in searching for natural resources like sapphires and barbasco, the people of these countries continued to search for them for financial gain. The economic value that the Malagasy had attributed to sapphires only appeared after the entry of foreign traders into Madagascar in 1996. (Walsh 2004: 228). While traders and miners profit from sapphires, foreign traders have much higher incomes than those who perform manual labor (Walsh 2012: 37). While they sold the same sapphires, the difference in profit came from differences in knowledge between different cultures (2012:46). The Malagasy did not believe that sapphires were used only for jewelry, even though that is what they were told (2012:47). This “notorious ignorance” was one of the factors that prevented miners from making more money from sapphires (2012: 47). Even though Malagasy miners did not profit as much as foreign buyers, many Malagasy locals illegally rushed inside Ankarana National Park to mine because they knew there was a possibility of profit. This is different from Ankarana's ecotourism industry, where there are nowhere near as many local Malagasy workers as in the sapphire trade due to international companies eager to extract more profits (Gezon 2014: 826). Starting in 1989, when AGNAP took over the management of protected areas and became responsible for paying salaries and operating costs, ecotourism was supposed to benefit the local population of Ankarana, but it did not. not reached (2014: 824-826). Ecotourism projects tended to employ low-paid indigenous labor, provide limited training, and offer inadequate compensation for purchasing local foods and crafts, and the highest paid tour guides were not local and were hired by tour operators (2014: 826). Although there appears to be no connection between ecotourism and sapphires in Ankarana, there is a connection between the two industries, namely Ankarana National Park (Walsh 2012: 49). The irony within Malagasy miners and the ecotourism industry is that ecotourism, which was supposed to create jobs for Madagascar's local population, relies on the exclusion of park locals who mine there while giving easy access to tourists wealthy enough to travel there. and pay entrance fees (Gezon 2014: 825). While many are interested in Ankarana sapphires for their economic value, sapphire consumers around the world place a different value on them. These global consumers value sapphires for their aesthetic value (Walsh 2012: 46). Around the world, sapphires are used in the manufacture of luxury items such as rings, earrings)