The concept of ecologically unequal exchange seeks to substantiate critical theories of development by highlighting the environmental and territorial consequences of wealth inequalities between countries. To theories of unequal exchange that attempt to explain why certain economies are stuck in a model of exporting low value-added goods, they add a physical rather than economic assessment of these international exchanges: the most developed countries drain the natural resources, particularly energy resources, of the least developed countries, while capturing a portion of these territories and dedicating it to the export economy. Hence the notion of ecologically unequal exchange allows us to examine dépaysement in two ways: firstly, exporting constitutes a literal displacement, a transfer beyond the borders of an entity that carries with it a dimension – in this case, an ecological one – of its country of origin; secondly, the transformation of a territory to produce goods that will be sold abroad can be considered as a displacement not only of goods but of the producing territory itself. Indeed, the theory of ecologically unequal exchange shows that these territories can be considered as ecological enclaves of the importing country within the exporting country. We will conduct these reflections based on a comparative reading of Underdeveloping the Amazon (Stephen Bunker, 1987) – the seminal work on this approach – and a concrete study of ecologically unequal exchange on intensive shrimp farming in Ecuador by ecologist Howard Odum (1991).