It considers the inequities hidden in the monetary value of trade flows not only in terms of wages, and quantities of labor but also regarding materials, energy and environmental degradation.
[11] This concept described “his concern with how 19th century large-scale industry and agriculture under capitalism combined to impoverish the soil (environment) and the worker through the growing asymmetric exchange of nutrients and other material resources between town and countryside.”[12] In the 1940 Raúl Prebisch observed a hierarchy in the global economic system and deterioration of trade for primary product while working for the United Nations Economic Commissions for America Latina.
[12] Ecologically unequal exchange (EUE) refers to the environmentals aspects of unequal exchange: it is an empirical evidence-based concept that refers to the effect of the structure of international trade under capitalism, in particular to the asymmetric flow of embodied materials and energy from peripheral countries - mainly located in the Global South - to the core developed world.
From this perspective, Global South countries tend to serve as a source of raw materials, sink for waste products and places to establish sacrifice zones, perpetuating global inequalities and uneven environmental impacts which disproportionately harm the people in developing countries but serve the productive capacity and the economy of the so-called developed.
The EUE theory is based on the world-systems perspective developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi and Andre Gunder Frank.
While the former EUE originated in academia, Ecological Debt is a concept born within Environmental Justice Organizations in the 1990s, and only later taken up by academics (Martinez-Alier 2002; Warlenius et al. 2015a, 2015b).
The concept appeared as a response to the economic debt that was putting pressure on the global South, which is considered a mechanism of the North to exploit Southern peoples and the environment.
[20] Differently from the intra-countries inequalities that can be resolved with redistributive policies, the EUE requires a global will to change the rules of the international trade system that create these disparities.
[22] For Corsi et al., the existence of an EUE shows how sustainability strategies presumed on green growth and dematerialization allow some regions of the Global North to “increase economic growth and improve their environmental performance at the expense of consuming the environmental space of others (mainly Semi-periphery), which in turn perpetrates similar dynamics towards Peripheral regions (Global South) [...] The global economy is far from a perfectly competitive market, being most of the capacity to drive and acquire ecological resources vastly concentrated in a handful of economically powerful countries”.