The Economics of Excrement: From Guano Wars to FMT Startups

Table of Contents

Scatology - This article is part of a series.

Part 1: Scatology in Culture: Full Research Overview

Part 2: Scatology in Philosophy: From Diogenes to Postmodernism

Part 3: Scatology in Art: From Manzoni to Moscow Actionism

Part 4: Scatology in Literature: From Rabelais to Sorokin

Part 5: This Article

Part 6: Feces as Political Weapon: From Diogenes to Pavlensky

Part 7: Scatological Lexicon: Etymology, Taboo, and Euphemisms

Part 8: Medical Scatology: Microbiome, FMT, and the Coprolological Revolution

Part 9: Sacred Feces: Scatology in World Mythology and Religion

This investigation uses only publicly available information (open-source intelligence). No private systems were accessed. All methods are disclosed in the methodology section.

ID INV-033-4

Type research

Status verified

Confidence HIGH

Sources 25

Reviewed by FolkUp Editorial

Review date 2026-03-03

Introduction
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Economic history encompasses many surprising commodities, but few can match the paradox of excrement. From bird droppings that sparked wars in the nineteenth century to contemporary biotech startups trading in fecal microbiota, biological waste has repeatedly become the focus of serious economic interests. This article explores the phenomenon of transforming scatological material into a commercial good, spanning one and a half centuries of economic history.

Guano Wars: When Droppings Were Worth More Than Gold
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One of the most dramatic chapters in the economic history of excrement involves the trade in guano—bird droppings accumulated on islands off the coast of Peru. In the nineteenth century, guano became a critically important resource for European and North American agriculture due to its exceptionally high nitrogen content.

From 1840 to 1870, Peru exported 12 million tons of guano worth $500 million USD. The country’s economic dependence on this resource was colossal: in 1859, of the total government revenue of $22 million, $16 million came directly from guano exports. Peru transformed into a classic export-oriented economy built on a single commodity—bird droppings.

Guano was harvested primarily on three tiny Chincha Islands, where cormorants, boobies, and pelicans had accumulated deposits of exceptionally valuable fertilizer over centuries. The significance of this resource was so great that in April 1864, Spanish troops occupied Chincha to gain control over the guano trade. Peruvian and Chilean forces, later supported by Ecuador and Bolivia, successfully defended the islands and forced the Spanish to withdraw.

The guano boom ended in the 1870s: exports fell from 575,000 tons in 1869 to less than 350,000 tons by 1873. Trade was definitively disrupted by the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), in which control of resources again became a key factor in the conflict.

Ambergris: Whale Vomit as Perfume Currency
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If guano was a mass agricultural commodity, ambergris represents the opposite extreme—an exclusive, rarest material used in the production of elite fragrances. Ambergris is a waxy substance formed in the digestive tract of sperm whales. Only 1% of the sperm whale population can produce this substance, making it exceptionally rare.

Sperm whales feed on squid at great depths, and squid beaks—harder than virtually all known metals and polymers—are not digested. As a result, a hardened mass with a complex aromatic profile forms in the whale’s intestines, eventually expelled from the body and floating in the ocean for years, acquiring characteristic properties.

The perfume industry values ambergris for its fixative qualities and unique fragrance. It has traditionally been used in prestigious compositions such as Givenchy Amarige and Chanel No. 5. The current market price of ambergris is approximately $15,000 per pound, and depending on quality can reach $40,000 per kilogram. In 2023, a sperm whale carcass found in the Canary Islands contained ambergris worth approximately $500,000.

An entire industry has formed around ambergris: collectors, dealers, brokers, and appraisers comb beaches worldwide in search of this treasure. Ambergris remains one of the most valuable raw materials in the beauty industry, valued at $571 billion. Although many perfumers today use synthetic alternatives (such as Ambroxan), natural ambergris continues to command high prices on the market.

Kopi Luwak: Coprophagy as Marketing Strategy
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Kopi luwak is an Indonesian coffee made from beans that have passed through the digestive tract of the Asian palm civet. The animal eats coffee berries, partially digests them, and then excretes beans fermented during their passage through the intestines. This coffee was named one of the most expensive in the world: retail prices reach $100 per kilogram for farm-collected beans and up to $1,300 per kilogram for wild-collected beans.

The kopi luwak market demonstrates sustained growth. According to analyst estimates, the market volume was $7.17 billion in 2024 and is forecast at $9.91 billion by 2031 at an average annual growth rate of 4.13%. The Asia-Pacific region dominates the market, with Indonesia leading due to the natural habitat of civets on Java and Sumatra.

However, the traditional method of harvesting wild civet droppings has been replaced by intensive farm production: animals are kept in battery cages and forcibly fed coffee berries. This raises serious ethical concerns related to animal isolation, inadequate diet, cramped conditions, and high mortality rates.

Notably, within the coffee industry itself, kopi luwak is viewed skeptically. The Specialty Coffee Association of America states a “general consensus in the industry… that it simply tastes bad.” Thus, the high price of kopi luwak is based not on taste quality, but on rarity, the exotic nature of the production process, and marketing strategy that transforms biological waste into a luxury item.

Merda d’artista: Excrement as Art Market Critique
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In 1961, Italian artist Piero Manzoni created a work titled “Merda d’artista” (Artist’s Shit)—90 tin cans, each allegedly filled with 30 grams of his own feces. The 4.8 by 6.5 centimeter cans were labeled with stickers in Italian, English, French, and German, indicating the contents.

Manzoni’s original pricing strategy stipulated that the cans would cost as much as their equivalent weight in gold—$37 per unit in 1961, with the possibility of price fluctuations depending on gold’s market value. Pricing by gold weight transformed “Merda d’artista” into a game with the market price of artworks, while the resemblance to industrial cans pointed to art’s integration into consumer society.

The work has increased dramatically in price:

In 2007, a can sold at Sotheby’s for €124,000
In October 2015, can #54 went to Christie’s for £182,500
In August 2016, at an auction in Milan, one of the cans set a new record at €275,000 including auction fees

Had Manzoni’s original pricing scheme still applied, a can should have been worth only $395.77. By 1991, “Merda d’artista” had outpaced gold in price by more than 70 times.

Manzoni’s cans anticipated the transformation of art objects into speculative investment after the abandonment of the gold standard. They also point to the growing arbitrariness of art prices. By determining the price of his cans in a fundamentally arbitrary manner, Manzoni demonstrates that the price of an artwork cannot be fundamentally justified.

FMT Startups: From Taboo to Therapy
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Perhaps the most unexpected chapter in the economics of excrement is the fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) industry. This medical procedure involves transferring fecal material from a healthy donor into the intestine of a patient to restore normal microbiota.

OpenBiome, a startup grown from MIT, created the first public stool bank in 2014. The organization rapidly scaled: from its first patient to collaboration with more than 130 hospitals in 34 US states. OpenBiome provided safe universal access to FMT therapies, although in February the company announced the shutdown of FMT operations—a decision accelerated by costs associated with COVID-19.

The biotech industry is actively developing microbiome-based therapies built on FMT principles:

Seres Therapeutics, Finch, and Rebiotix have developed drugs that may become the first microbiome therapies approved by the FDA for treating recurrent Clostridioides difficile infection
EnteroBiotix is developing pharmaceutical-grade oral capsules containing intestinal bacteria from healthy donors as an alternative to FMT. Their lead candidate EBX-102-02 showed promising results in Phase IIa clinical trials for irritable bowel syndrome with constipation
Microbiotica, spun off from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, uses machine learning to characterize bacterial strains associated with positive outcomes and is developing live biotherapeutics for specific patient populations

To date, the FDA has approved FMT and live biotherapeutic products only for therapeutic use in recurrent C. difficile infection following antibiotic treatment, although other potential clinical applications are actively being researched. Two live biotherapeutic products have already received FDA approval.

Conclusion: From Droppings to Biotechnology
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The economic history of excrement demonstrates a fundamental paradox of the capitalist system: the value of a commodity is determined not by its intrinsic properties, but by market mechanisms, scarcity, cultural perceptions, and technological capabilities. Bird droppings become a strategic resource when agriculture needs fertilizer. Whale vomit transforms into a perfume treasure due to rarity and unique properties. Coffee beans from civet droppings sell at the price of gold purely through marketing exotic production. A tin can filled with human feces becomes an investment that outpaces gold while simultaneously critiquing the absurdity of the art market itself.

The modern era adds a new dimension: biotechnology transforms feces into a therapeutic product based on scientific understanding of the microbiome. FMT startups work not with the symbolic or cultural value of excrement, but with its objective biological function—opening a new chapter in the economics of scatology.

From the guano wars of the nineteenth century to the biotech startups of the twenty-first, excrement remains a reminder that in economics, value is always the result of human relationships, technology, and ideas imposed upon matter, however ungainly.