PRODUCING EXCESS, EXPORTING TERRITORY

When the freedom to choose begins with the possibility of not destroying oneself

A ship leaves the port.

Inside its holds travel grain, minerals, timber, energy, and thousands of liters of water embedded in production.

The numbers record growth. The market celebrates the export. GDP rises.

In the territory, the river is lower. Dust has reached the homes. A road has divided the forest. Part of the wealth has departed, while the Body-Territory remains with the consequences.

Perhaps Latin America is not poor.

Perhaps it has been organized to produce wealth without fully deciding where that wealth will go.

Activities based on natural resources account for approximately half of Latin American exports, while representing much smaller shares of regional value added and employment. Dependence on primary commodities also leaves economies vulnerable to price fluctuations and decisions made by external buyers.

The question that remains on the shore is:

How much of a territory can be exported before its inhabitants lose the material conditions needed to choose their own future?

Exchange does not condemn us to a single economy

In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow show that human societies combined exchange, markets, property, cities, and political organization in many different ways.

The existence of objects used as stores or symbols of value—grain, shells, stones, feathers, or metals—does not mean that contemporary capitalism has always existed.

It means something more fertile:

Human beings have always been capable of creating, testing, and abandoning economic rules.

Markets did not emerge in a single form. Property, authority, and exchange have been organized differently throughout history. This diversity opens space for imagining new forms of freedom and social organization.

The current financial market is not a law of nature.

It was built through rules that determine who receives credit, which assets generate returns, which risks are protected, and which losses remain outside the accounting system.

Those rules can also change.

When destruction increases GDP

Imagine a community that has always drawn drinking water from a river.

As long as the river remains clean, it sustains people, crops, animals, and memories without passing through a cash register.

Then the water becomes contaminated.

The community begins buying bottled water. Trucks make deliveries. Packaging is produced. Treatment companies are hired. Hospitals attend to new illnesses. Public works attempt to repair the damage.

More money circulates.

GDP may rise.

The healthy river, which continuously produced the conditions for life, was almost invisible to the indicator. The degraded river now activates a chain of goods, treatments, and reconstruction.

The problem is not the calculation of GDP.

It provides important information about economic production.

The problem begins when GDP growth becomes an automatic synonym for progress.

We may produce more because we are living better.

We may also produce more because we are paying to survive what has been destroyed.

A gaze that sees returns before life

Governments across different political orientations frequently place economic policy in the hands of professionals trained to observe inflation, interest rates, debt, investment, and market confidence.

These elements matter.

But financial markets view the world from a particular position: they seek returns, security, liquidity, and the ability to exit.

A forest may appear as timber, a concession, or a carbon credit.

A river may appear as energy, irrigation, or commercial water supply.

A community may appear as labor, consumption, or compensation costs.

The investor can leave.

The Body-Territory remains.

It is the Body-Territory that will breathe the dust, search for another source of water, face the flood, and reorganize life after the economic cycle ends.

The production of excess begins when a territory is organized to supply more and more in response to needs defined elsewhere:

more minerals;

more grain;

more timber;

more energy;

more data;

more embedded water.

Production grows, but autonomy may shrink.

Human decisions are not explained by evil alone

Faced with this situation, it would be easy to conclude that human beings are naturally selfish and will always choose individual gain.

In Humankind, Rutger Bregman proposes another perspective. He brings together studies and historical experiences to challenge the idea that people are essentially bad and motivated only by self-interest. Cooperation, trust, and solidarity also belong deeply to human experience.

This does not mean that human beings never destroy, exploit, or kill.

It means that these actions cannot be explained only as expressions of an inevitably cruel human nature.

When a person lacks food, housing, income, or any sense of a future, the future itself can narrow before them.

Those who feel they have nothing left to lose may accept risks they would reject under other conditions.

The experience that inspires this text includes witnessing people willing to burn forests or even harm other human beings under conditions of extreme need.

This testimony does not establish a universal rule.

It reveals an ethical problem:

Can we call a decision free when every available alternative appears to lead to loss?

Research on scarcity suggests that a lack of resources can concentrate attention on immediate urgencies and increase the value placed on present outcomes over future ones. At the same time, scientific findings are not uniform: in some situations, people experiencing scarcity make more consistent choices precisely because every resource matters more.

Need does not automatically make someone worse.

It changes the horizon within which the decision takes place.

First return, then investigate

This is where the Neuro Challenge Latam needs to change direction.

We should not place people experiencing extreme need before a choice between preservation and survival, then interpret their decisions as a measure of environmental awareness.

First, we need to restore the material conditions of choice.

Then we can investigate what becomes possible.

The proposal is to create a Citizen Drex, distributed through a future retail CBDC infrastructure.

This Citizen Drex would function as an unconditional income:

it would not depend on the answer given during the experiment;

it would not be withdrawn if the person made the “wrong” choice;

it would not expire after a certain period;

it would not control lawful purchases;

it would not operate as a reward for obedience.

It would arrive first.

The amount would need to be sufficient to reduce the pressure of basic needs, taking into account food, water, housing, transportation, and local living conditions.

The official Drex remains under development. The current pilot simulates operations without end users or real assets, and the design presented by the Central Bank of Brazil envisions retail services settled mainly through tokenized deposits issued by authorized institutions.

The Citizen Drex is therefore a BrainLatam proposal for a future public retail architecture, not an existing benefit.

Biome Income

Alongside the Citizen Drex, the territory would receive a Biome Income.

When a forest sustains water circulation, a mangrove reduces storm impacts, or living soil retains carbon, nutrients, and moisture, continuous material production is taking place.

Today, much of the money that reaches a territory arrives when someone promises to extract, sell, build, or create debt.

We can imagine another rule:

The verified continuity of the Biome can also place new money into circulation.

This income would be linked to territorial indicators defined with local participation:

water quality and availability;

biodiversity;

carbon retained or removed;

prevention of floods and erosion;

soil regeneration;

waste reduction and reuse.

The first recipients would be the people who live in and care for the Biome, along with community funds for water, health, climate prevention, and restoration.

Brazil’s National Policy for Payment for Environmental Services already recognizes functions such as carbon sequestration, air purification, water-cycle regulation, and the moderation of extreme events. The law also prioritizes Indigenous peoples, traditional communities, and family farmers in federal programs.

The Brazilian Emissions Trading System has created another possible structure for recognizing verified greenhouse-gas reductions.

Biome Income, however, would go beyond reducing the forest to carbon.

The territory would participate in defining the measurements, governing the data, and distributing the resources.

The experiment after restoration

Only after a period of receiving Citizen Drex and Biome Income would the tests begin.

Participants would encounter decisions involving:

• immediate reward and future preservation;

• national benefit and local harm;

• individual profit and community cost;

• familiar extraction and an uncertain regenerative alternative;

• GDP growth and the preservation of water.

The decisions could involve real, limited resources from a research fund.

One portion could go to the participant.

Another could support water protection, restoration, community production, or emergency prevention.

No choice would threaten the basic income already received.

EEG could follow expectation, comparison, attention, and outcome evaluation.

NIRS could observe prefrontal effort during conflicts between present benefits and future or collective consequences.

But the main analysis would compare the same person across different moments:

how they imagined the future under extreme need;

how they began deciding after receiving material security;

how their choices changed when the Biome also began generating income for the community.

The signals would be combined with personal accounts, behavior, and material indicators.

The question would not be:

Who has the most environmentally conscious brain?

It would be:

What happens to the capacity to preserve when survival no longer depends on destruction?

When preservation also makes life possible

We can return to the port.

Another ship is preparing to leave.

This time, the territory participates in deciding what can depart and what must remain.

Those who live there no longer need to choose between feeding their families and protecting the forest.

Water has a presence in the accounting system.

The Biome generates income without having to disappear.

The citizen participates in the economy before selling attention, labor, or the territory in which they live.

Perhaps freedom does not begin when we offer two options.

Perhaps it begins when neither option requires a person to destroy themselves, their community, or the place that sustains life.

When Citizen Drex and Biome Income arrive before the decision, a new question becomes possible:

What do human beings choose when they finally have something to preserve—and the material conditions needed to preserve it?

This passage leads us to the next blog:

The Biome Is Not Scenery: It Is Living Infrastructure

Essential references

Bregman, R. Humankind: A Hopeful History. 2020.

Graeber, D.; Wengrow, D. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. 2021.

De Bruijn, E.-J.; Antonides, G. Poverty and Economic Decision Making: A Review of Scarcity Theory. 2022.

Fehr, D.; Fink, G.; Jack, B. K. Poor and Rational: Decision-Making under Scarcity. 2022.

ECLAC. Natural Resources Outlook in Latin America and the Caribbean. 2024.

UNCTAD. The State of Commodity Dependence 2025. 2025.

Brazil. Law No. 14,119/2021 — National Policy for Payment for Environmental Services.

Brazil. Law No. 15,042/2024 — Brazilian Emissions Trading System.

Central Bank of Brazil. Drex Pilot and Development.

The title may also be adapted to “Producing Surplus, Exporting Territory”, but “excess” better preserves the specific BrainLatam concept.