Economic growth in the “advanced economies” of the Northern part of the world is based on a broad net appropriation of resources and manpower from the global South, obtained through price differentials in international trade. This would be demonstrated by a study conducted by Jason Hickel, researcher at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), Spain, which uses input-output environmental data and footprint analysis to calculate the scale and the value of the resources drained from the global South in the period 1990-2015.
The results, recently published in the journal “Global Environmental Change”, would show that, in the course of 2015, the North of the world would have appropriated, in net terms, 12 billion tons of equivalents of raw materials incorporated from the South, which means that nearly half (43 percent) of annual material consumption would be net appropriation of the South.
By net appropriation we mean that these resources are not compensated in equivalent terms through trade. Similarly, the “advanced” countries of the North would have appropriated 822 million hectares of land from the South in 2015 (more than double that of India), as well as 21 exajoules of energy (equivalent to 3.4 billion barrels of oil) and 392 billion hours of work.
When measured in Northern prices, resource and labor consumption amounted to $ 10.8 trillion in 2015, an economic amount sufficient to end extreme poverty 70 times over. This would amount to $ 242 trillion in the period from 1990 to 2015.