A highly developed market economy involves a high volume of long-distance trade, where African coffee and Latin American fruit, containing the labour of local people and the fertility of the land, are shipped to New York and Europe to become consumer goods. After the nutrients are absorbed in the cities of developed market economies, the leftovers end up as rubbish. However, in traditional agricultural societies, such human and food waste are not rubbish but rather a valuable source of soil nutrients. In the absence of long-distance trade and the frequent interregional movement of materials, these nutrients would flow back to where they came from and be recycled. But in contemporary times, especially in the last two centuries of highly developed globalisation and marketisation, a great contradiction has arisen, namely, that the fertility of the land is being transported from its place of origin to other regions in the form of products, and that the nutrients produced never have the means to return, which in turn leads to a diminishing of fertility at the place of production and, in the long run, is unsustainable and destructive.
Ding Ling and Xu Zhun, Why Chinese Agriculture Must Undergo an Ecological Transformation
