More than 900 million tonnes of materials, 4 million km2 of land, and 53 billion hours of labour. This is the scale of resources that the Global North net appropriated from Latin America through international trade in 2020 alone, according to a new study by ICTA-UAB which analyses ecologically unequal exchange and economic dependency.
This is the first study to jointly quantify the unequal exchanges of embodied labour and natural resources between Latin America and the Global North, as well as to situate these flows within the overall functioning of the global economy. From this perspective, the research shows that the Global North continues to appropriate enormous quantities of natural resources and labour from Latin America through international trade, reinforcing an increasingly unequal global economic structure.
The study finds that, over the entire period analysed, Latin America experienced a substantial drain of resources to the richest economies. During the 1995-2020 period, the Global North net appropriated 935 million tonnes of materials from the region, including biomass, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels. This was accompanied by 4 million km2 of land and 53 billion hours of human labour, valued at €816 billion in terms of Northern wages. This enables high levels of consumption in the Global North. Over this period, 13.5% of all metals destined for final consumption in the Global North were appropriated from Latin America.
This unequal exchange occurs because of major power imbalances in the global economy. Richer countries intervene to artificially compress the prices for resources and labour in the Global South, gaining access to cheap inputs for production and increasing their own profits. These dynamics enable wealth accumulation in the Global North while depriving the periphery of resources and the ability to use domestic productive capacity towards sovereign development.
The research further highlights that Latin America experiences levels of appropriation far higher than the rest of the Global South in per capita terms. In 2020, Northern appropriation of land from Latin America was 1909% higher than from the rest of the Global South; for metals the difference reached 2164%, and for biomass it was 660% higher. While these figures have declined since 1995 in China and other peripheral regions, they have continued to increase in Latin America.
According to the authors, these results show that Latin America's position in the world economy is increasingly "peripheral" in character. The region remains specialised in the export of raw materials and natural resources that are subsequently consumed in the Global North in the form of manufactured goods and higher value-added services.
The study concludes that, without a fundamental restructuring of international trade relations and a rebalancing of power between the Global North and South, Latin America's economic dependence and the core–periphery structure of the global economy are likely to persist.
Article reference: Hanbury Lemos, M., & Hickel, J. (2026). Open veins: Drain from Latin America through ecologically unequal exchange. Ecological Economics. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2026.109055
