In the late nineteenth century, a farmer in Germany would invest in buying fertilizer, apply it to his land, produce crops, consume these to satisfy family needs, and trade the remainder in a nearby village or town. If the nineteenth century farmer overexploited his land and encroached on his village's woodlands, he would be held accountable for his actions by his village as the woods provided timber, fuelwood, mushrooms, and berries. A hundred years later, such feedback mechanisms have dissipated in Germany. For its survival, the village no longer depends on the land and woods. Food and timber are now bought in supermarkets and do-it-yourself stores. However, in the remoter parts of Borneo or Papua, villagers still depend on their land, forests, and customary laws. Laws rarely prove resilient to stop the bulldozers of a plantation company whose concession covers not just all of the villagers' land but even the village itself. The company may well in part be funded by German investment capital. Its task is straightforward: to clear the villagers' land and forests, so as to plant crops to “feed the world”.

Globalization is as old as colonialism, but the scale and speed of global trade and investment have multiplied since the postcolonial era. Free trade meant that capital was directed to exploit regional and national comparative natural and human resource advantages. As trade globalized, the physical distances between the localities of production and consumption significantly increased. Along with this process, insight in the chain was dramatically reduced, as was the accountability of the actors in the trade chain.

Transparency (full information) is a precondition to well-functioning free markets. However, in the globalized market, farmers of rubber, palm oil, oranges, et cetera no longer know the final destination of their produce. Similarly, they often do not know the ultimate source of capital that they use to expand their economic activities. Consumers have lost touch with the lands and seas that feed them and ever fewer know how financial institutions reallocate their savings to a range of economic activities. Due to lack of information, consumers cannot evaluate the credibility of information made by the companies that sell products to them.