Drained and underpaid
Capitalism’s ecologically destructive path fuels inequality in who bears the brunt of resource extraction, environmental damage, and blame. Research on Ecological Unequal Exchange (EUE) has highlighted this issue. But why exactly is EUE unequal? First, the system’s relentless demand for resources by wealthy regions leaves the rest deprived, turning EUE into an environmental zero-sum game. Second, the local environmental damage caused by extraction is unfairly concentrated in specific areas, deepening the inequality. Third, the global South is not just drained of natural resources but also underpaid, reinforcing long-term uneven development. We can illustrate this by measuring the average monetary compensation per resource exported. Specifically, we divide the Trade in Value Added (TiVA, i.e., value added by all production steps within a country) in exports by the resources used in those exports. For example, one study shows that high-income countries capture 11 times greater compensation per ton of raw material in exports compared to low-income countries. The graphs shared here support this by plotting per capita net imports of resources against TiVA per resource exported, demonstrating that the more a country is drained of resources through trade, the more underpaid it tends to be in the process.