The world's money system is rigged: rich countries get paid way more when they kill off a species than poor countries do.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
Fiscal policy space and the unequal exchange of biodiversity loss in global agrifood trade
SSRN · 6443486
The Takeaway
This research reveals that biodiversity loss is tied to a nation's rank in the 'currency hierarchy' rather than just agricultural practices. Countries with higher monetary sovereignty are able to effectively price environmental destruction into their export value, meaning the economic 'cost' of a species going extinct is literally cheaper in the Global South due to the way central banking works.
From the abstract
Agricultural land-use change is the dominant driver of terrestrial biodiversity loss and is increasingly attributed to international agrifood trade. This study investigates the political-economic structures underpinning asymmetric flows of embedded biodiversity loss by integrating ecological unequal exchange (EUE) and post-Keynesian theoretical frameworks. We combine the ‘land-cover impacts on future extinction’ (LIFE) metric from the global environmental indicators of consumption (GEIC) dataset