For more than two centuries, nations have relentlessly pursued the same objective: rebalancing their trade accounts. Governments seek to export more than they import. Central banks monitor exchange rates. International organisations negotiate free trade agreements. Economists debate comparative advantages, competitive devaluations and current account imbalances.
This entire intellectual architecture rests on the same obsession: determining who wins and who loses in international trade. Yet one fundamental question is almost never asked.
Who actually pays for this permanent competition between nations?
At first glance, the answer seems obvious. Importers pay exporters. Debtors repay creditors. Trade balances adjust according to monetary flows and exchange rate variations. But this representation is misleading.
Because behind the visible financial flows lie invisible material flows: tonnes of extracted minerals, emptied aquifers, depleted soils, destroyed forests, burned hydrocarbons and degraded ecosystems. Every time a country improves its competitiveness by exporting more resources, a portion of its biophysical heritage is converted into money. Every time a major power secures its supply of raw materials, an additional portion of the biosphere is mobilised to fuel this rivalry.
Thus, international trade does not merely pit companies or states against each other. It pits the regenerative capacities of the planet itself against one another.
The true clearing house for this competition is neither the foreign exchange market, nor the International Monetary Fund, nor central banks. It is the biosphere. It freely supplies the resources needed for this global race for competitiveness. It freely absorbs the waste and emissions that result. It silently bears the physical costs of a system whose indicators measure only monetary flows.
In this sense, the planet and its natural resources have become the true payers of first and last resort of international trade.
Every trade deficit can be refinanced. Every sovereign debt can be restructured. Every currency can be devalued. But no institution can refinance an exhausted aquifer, reconstitute a destroyed soil in a few years, or recreate a mineral deposit formed over millions of years.
The system's blindness lies here: it believes it is arbitrating monetary claims between nations while it organises, in the background, the progressive liquidation of the only capital upon which all economic activity depends.
The myth of automatic equilibrium
Classical international trade theory was built on an elegant promise: international specialisation, guided by comparative advantages, would produce mutual gains and spontaneously tend towards an equilibrium beneficial to all. David Ricardo formulated the most rigorous version in 1817. The Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson model extended this logic by postulating that nations export goods incorporating the factors of production with which they are abundantly endowed.
This theoretical architecture rests on a central assumption: the international immobility of capital and labour. Yet global capitalism has contradicted this on one side only. Capital has become extremely mobile. Labour has remained constrained by migration barriers. This fundamental asymmetry — mobile capital, immobile labour — is precisely what gives rise to unequal exchange.
In the liberal representation, the flexible exchange rate is supposed to function as an automatic stabiliser. A deficit country sees its currency depreciate, making imports more expensive and exports cheaper. The deficit resolves itself. But this automatic rebalancing is, in practice, a fiction. France illustrates this impasse: its goods trade deficit reached nearly 100 billion euros in 2023, with eurozone membership — which prohibits any national competitive devaluation — offering no exchange rate remedy.
Unequal exchange: what prices do not reveal
The theory of unequal exchange, formulated by Arghiri Emmanuel and extended by Samir Amin, demonstrates that world trade does not equalise living standards — it polarises the world-system. In a market where the rate of profit tends to equalise through capital mobility, the massive disparities in nominal wages between centre and periphery — well above real productivity gaps — create a structural price distortion. Recent empirical estimates put this invisible value transfer at approximately 2.2 trillion dollars annually.
But this economic critique is only the surface of a deeper problem. From a thermodynamic standpoint, raw natural resources of low entropy — highly organised, dense, precious — are extracted freely from the biosphere. Their market price only remunerates the technical cost of extraction. The thermodynamic organisation accumulated over millions of years is captured without compensation. International trade thus organises a metabolic haemorrhage from the periphery to the centre: poor countries exhaust their ecosystems to feed value chains controlled by the North.
The example of Egyptian orange exports illustrates this concretely: the price paid to the local producer sometimes represents less than 10% of the final retail price in Northern supermarkets. Egypt does not export oranges alone. It exports vast volumes of virtual water and mineral nutrients drawn from its soils, without these ecological costs ever being remunerated.
Debt as an extraction pump
The persistence of extractivism in the Global South cannot be understood independently of dollarised sovereign debt. Fadhel Kaboub has theorised this mechanism as a vicious circle: when a country faces massive external debt contracted in hard currencies, its priorities are subordinated to the absolute necessity of generating dollars. The most accessible strategy is to attract foreign investment in raw extraction sectors. This model leads to chronic underinvestment in strategic domestic sectors: local food production, processing industry, local renewable energy. The economy accumulates three structural deficits that feed one another: food, energy, and technological.
These deficits maintain the trade balance in a state of permanent deficit, exerting continuous depreciatory pressure on the national currency. Depreciation raises the cost of vital imports. Central banks exhaust their reserves. The country borrows in dollars again. And the cycle restarts. Nature becomes the asset of last resort, the only one immediately convertible into hard currency. The South's virtual financial debt to the North is resolved through the extraction of a real, colossal, unaccounted ecological debt.
The contradiction reaches its apex with climate finance: loans in hard currencies granted to Southern countries to finance their ecological transition mechanically worsen their external debt stock. And the only available method for repaying these green loans consists in accelerating the extraction of raw materials. The IMF has itself recommended expanding fossil fuel extraction in the structural adjustment policies imposed on at least eleven recipient countries.
Economic warfare as the normal state
The ideology of free trade has always coexisted with the practice of economic warfare. Friedrich List formulated it: England had built its industrial power under rigorous protections before prescribing free trade to less developed nations — a strategy of "kicking away the ladder" after having climbed it. Spanish mercantilism prohibited any export of gold on pain of death. French Colbertism blocked manufactured imports through prohibitive tariffs. England in the 17th and 18th centuries prohibited its colonies from processing their local raw materials.
In the contemporary era, the United States allocates hundreds of billions of dollars to its military and space sector through R&D contracts — a massive state subsidy that develops dual-use civil and military technologies, securing global technological supremacy without ever being qualified as an export subsidy.
The international financial architecture born at Bretton Woods enshrines a durable imperial asymmetry. The Triffin dilemma unfolds in two forms: the United States must maintain permanent current account deficits to supply global liquidity, while incurring ever greater debt to satisfy global demand for safe assets. Asian and European central banks recycle their trade surpluses into US Treasury bonds, cheaply financing the power of the hegemon against which they attempt to compete.
Four demonstrations: the biosphere as supreme payer
The thermodynamic demonstration. Raw natural resources of low entropy are extracted freely. Their intrinsic thermodynamic value — accumulated over millions of years — is never integrated into market prices. The biosphere finances the profit of the Global North by supplying high-quality thermodynamic flows whose real physical wear is never accounted for.
The exchange rate demonstration. Monetary asymmetries between hegemonic currencies and peripheral currencies amplify material extraction. The continuous depreciation of peripheral currencies artificially reduces costs for investors holding hard currencies. Northern multinationals outsource their most polluting productions to zones of weak ecological protection. The North maintains the purity of its domestic ecosystems by importing goods incorporating vast volumes of virtual water, degraded energy and destroyed land.
The financial demonstration. Dollarised debt structures act as a biophysical suction pump on Southern ecosystems. The permanent obligation to generate hard currency to service external debt compels non-industrialised countries to over-exploit and liquidate their forests, hydrocarbon reserves and strategic minerals. The South's virtual financial debt is resolved through the extraction of a real, unpaid and unaccounted ecological debt.
The geopolitical demonstration. The aggressive race for secured supply of critical materials pushes peripheral governments to repress their own populations to guarantee the fluidity of mineral exports. The biosphere bears the full force of the thermodynamic acceleration imposed by this competition: irreversible destruction of biodiversity, fracture of major geochemical cycles, systemic disruption of the global climate.
The illusory race: infinite competition, finite planet
Trade balance cannot be achieved by all simultaneously, since the system is structurally hierarchical and one nation's surplus is another's deficit. But the critique must go beyond zero-sum accounting logic. The international trade race is not merely illusory for the nations competing in it. It is destructive for the physical substrate upon which it takes place.
The biosphere is the supreme, silent and unaccounted payer of international trade competition. It pays through the systematic devaluation of its resources in market prices. It pays through the exchange rate asymmetries that amplify biophysical plunder at low cost. It pays through the debt structures that transform its forests and minerals into assets of last resort. It pays through the geopolitical competition that makes it the theatre of a permanent war whose every externality it absorbs.
The planet, its soils, its waters, its atmosphere and its biodiversity appear in no national balance sheet. No court can seize their assets for default. It is precisely this absence of formal economic status that makes them the ultimate guarantee of the global trading edifice — a guarantee that can be called upon indefinitely without ever having to be repaid, until the biosphere itself declares its own insolvency.
This is not a metaphor. It is a physical reality in progress.
Jean-Christophe Duval