Campaigners have long argued that the wealth of the global North has been based on the appropriation of resources and labor from the global South, but often this hypothesis has focused on things such as slavery and colonies. Research from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona reminds us that this continues to take place today via price differentials in international trade.
The study uses environmental input-output data alongside footprint analysis to explore the scale and value of the resource drain from the global South between 1990 and 2015. The results show that the global North appropriated around 12 billion tons of raw materials from the South in 2015 alone, with nearly half of all annual consumption in the North appropriated from the South. The researchers argue that these raw materials are not compensated in equivalent terms via trade.
Similarly, the countries of the North also appropriated around 822 million hectares of land as well, which works out at twice the size of India! This was accompanied by 21 exajoules of energy and 392 billion hours of work. Combined, this adds up to around $10.8 trillion during 2015 alone, which is enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over. Throughout the 25 year study period, this figure grows to an eye-watering $242 trillion.
Unfair trade
What’s more, this land would be sufficient to provide food for around 6 billion people, with the energy enough to cover the energy requirements of the South to ensure they have access to public transport, education, housing, sanitation, and healthcare.
“In other words, all this productive capacity could be used to meet local human needs, but instead it goes to serve capital accumulation in the North,” the authors explain.
This obviously represents an enormous windfall to countries in the North, with the paper suggesting this is equivalent to around a quarter of GDP in the region, but the true gains are extremely difficult to calculate.
What does appear clear is that such appropriation underpins capital accumulation itself. It’s a concept shared by Joe Earle, Lucy Ambler, and Nicola Scott in Reclaiming Economics for Future Generations, where they argue that the very institutions and infrastructure that allow the North to be more productive than the South have largely come about due to centuries of appropriation, and yet this is seldom recognized, with the North tending to succumb to the view instead that we are somehow better or more diligent than our peers in the South.
The matter is equally compounded by the climate considerations, with the North enjoying the economic fruits of the environmental harm caused in the South. While aid flows southwards, the researchers believe this is scant consolation, with each dollar of aid compared with the loss of around $30 as a result of the drain to donor countries. Indeed, it is usually the poorer countries that are developing the richer ones rather than the other way around.
