A/HRC/41/54 34. Among the factors that have led to the growth of the extractivism economy are changes in the world market relating to an intensification in fossil fuel production and lifestyles, and the economic rise of emerging economies such as China. Relatedly, the South-South extractivism economy has also expanded. For example, 90 per cent of the exports of Latin America to Asia in 2011 were raw materials. Chinese foreign direct investment in Latin America has increased dramatically, with the vast majority devoted to raw material extraction.42 Exponential demand for primary materials in different parts of the world has been accompanied by corresponding increases in commodity prices. For example, while crude oil prices fluctuate slightly from year to year, the price of a barrel of oil has over time steadily increased from about $30 in 2000 to more than $66 in 2018. At times, there have been dramatic increases in the price of metals, minerals and ores. 43 However, high prices for resources do not solely result from increased demand. They are also a by-product of a general trend towards the “financialization of nature”, a process in which global financial markets, instruments (such as derivatives and mortgages) and other processes gain control over nature, particularly over food, crops and mining. 44 Relatedly, capital investments in these sectors have grown at an unprecedented pace in many areas in the global South, leading to a growth in resource rents and revenues and in larger shares of the primary sector in the national GDP of many countries. 45 35. Notwithstanding these shifts, colonial-era sovereign inequality persists, and models of extraction that rely upon or produce racial, ethnic and indigenous exploitation remain a reality. Despite the vision of a new international economic order based on sovereign equality, which the Declaration on the Right to Development identifies as essential, the international economic order that underlies and structures the extractivism economy retains colonial inequalities. This means that, although international law has formally repudiated sovereign inequality, persisting sovereign inequality and foreign and international constraints on self-determination remain at the core of the extractivism economy. Indeed, some refer to this dynamic as reflecting a “‘commodity consensus’, i.e. a global constellation in which, in spite of the global politicization of the ecological crisis and climate change, the extractivist form of the appropriation of nature has remained the dominant global dynamic”. 46 Within this dynamic, territories of extraction remain politically and economically subordinate in a global political economy characterized by sovereign inequality.47 36. During times of significant global growth, countries rich in natural resources can capitalize on their commodities, generating high domestic growth rates. For example, extractivism now accounts for 20 per cent of the national GDP of Nigeria and, since 2007, 65 per cent of the revenues it uses for its public budget. 48 An ecological-economic critique draws attention to natural capital wealth depletion, which occurs in the absence of sufficient returns to host countries or their communities. The World Bank concludes that: “especially for resource-rich countries, the depletion of natural resources is often not compensated for by other investments”.49 One submission further highlighted that World Bank data showed that, as commodity prices had peaked in the 2007–2013 super cycle, resource depletion was a major factor in the reduction of wealth in Africa. The result is that, in many cases, peoples in the former colonial territories remain the losers in the global extractivism economy. 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 10 Brand, Dietz and Lang, “Neo-extractivism in Latin America”, p. 143. Ibid., p, 142. Bettina Engles and Kristina Dietz, eds., Contested Extractivism, Society and the State: Struggles over Mining and Land (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 2. Ibid., pp. 2–3. Brand, Dietz and Lang, “Neo-extractivism in Latin America”, p. 144, citing Svampa, “Commodities consensus”. For an international legal analysis of contemporary sovereign inequality, see Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, chap. 4. Holly Wise and Sokol Shtylla, The Role of the Extractive Sector in Expanding Economic Opportunity (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University, 2007), p. 7. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/29001/9781464810466.pdf? sequence=4&isAllowed=y, p. 82.