Ecological unequal exchange and ecological debt

The notions of Ecological unequal exchange and ecological debt are central to understanding the Capitalocene. Indeed, those notions show the extend of the exploitation of nature by the capitalist system. They also help in explaining how the western industrialised countries hold responsibility for the profound global environmental changes.
The concept of ecological unequal exchange is built on the notion of ‘unequal exchange’, developed in the 1960s and 1970s by authors such as Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel as part of underdevelopment theories. The argument of ‘unequal exchange’ is that, in the capitalist world-system, there is an exploitation of underdeveloped countries by developed countries taking place through international trade and the exchange of commodities (1). The exchange is unequal because rich countries have created an international division of labour in which they exploit the labour force of underdeveloped countries where wages are lower. Underdeveloped countries generally export commodities that contain more labour time than the goods that developed countries export, but as trade is mainly focused on monetary value such a difference is often not taken into account. This theory of ‘unequal exchange’ showed the disparity between the market price of a commodity and its hidden contained amount of labour resource. This exploitation has taken two forms: originally during colonialism and then as part of unequal exchange of free trade.

The notion of ecological unequal exchange extends this notion of unequal flows to flows of natural resources, energy and waste. It reveals how there is an unequal exchange happening in the capitalist system in which developed countries disproportionately exploit ecological systems and natural resources of poorer countries for their consumption, use those countries as sinks for the waste of their products and impose negative environmental costs to them (2). Such a use or deterioration of natural resources for the production of commodities is generally not taken into account in the market price of a good and becomes a negative externality that capitalism does not pay for. Generally, it is less developed countries that suffer from such ecological unequal exchanges and they are the ones bearing environmental burdens (such as forest loss, air pollution and water pollution). Thus, developed countries consume a high rate of natural resources and preserve their domestic environmental resources at the expense of poorer countries.

The notion of ecological unequal exchange has led to the idea of ecological debt, stating that the Global North has been accumulated a debt over centuries towards poorer and less developed nations because of the exploitation of their natural resources and ecosystems. It states that they owe an ecological debt in the form of some type of remuneration to poorer countries for the environmental degradation contained in the production of the goods they consume (3).

In the Capitalocene, not all humans are equally responsible for and affected by global environmental changes. The historical development of richer countries and the continuance of their unsustainable way of life is made possible by their exploitation of natural resources of poorer countries and the externalisation of environmental costs to the periphery. Then, the responsibility for global environmental changes should not be attributed to all humans in an undifferentiated way but should be attributed instead to the capitalist economy of the World-system that damages the planet at the expense of poorer countries.