The pollinator crisis and market forces

Nathaniel Johnson in the Guardian (UK) via Conservation magazine: …You may already know about the global pollinator crisis. Over the past 50 years, the number of domestic honeybee colonies in the U.S. has dropped by more than half. … At the same time, wild pollinators have been disappearing. No one has seen a Franklin bumblebee (native to Oregon and California) since 2006 or a rusty-patched bumblebee (once common in New York) since 2005. As if this were not enough, beekeepers began telling stories about something utterly strange: sterile worker bees were abandoning hives, leaving their queens and pupae behind to die. In 2006, researchers began calling this phenomenon colony collapse disorder and pegging it as the source of a global pollinator crisis. The media picked up the story, and it quickly embedded itself in the public consciousness—and in the scientific community.

It's a truly cautionary tale. Instead of a crisis that impacts humanity directly, such as a tidal wave or a pandemic, this one hits us as collateral damage through our ecological partners. … Then, last year, Argentine scientist Marcelo Aizen hit upon an elegant way to test that assumption. If there really were a crisis, he figured, harvests from crops that depend on bees and other pollinators should be declining or at least leveling out. Yet the yields of pollinator-dependent crops have grown at about the same rate as those of wind-pollinated crops. With Lawrence Harder, Aizen went on to show that instead of crashing, the total number of commercial honeybees has increased 45 percent in the past 50 years.

…In the process of demonstrating that no global pollinator crisis was occurring, Aizen and Harder found the portents of, well, a global pollination crisis. However, the crisis they foresee is one driven not by mysterious die-offs but by market pressures plainly visible in the produce aisle. It has to do with people in poor nations developing an appetite for good cocoa and coffee. It has to do with people in wealthy countries assuming that tomatoes will be ripe and readily available year-round. Bee scarcity, in other words, is an economic problem caused by economic forces.

So how does this economic explanation square with the clear and present biological crisis that Eric Olson faces on the ground in Yakima, Washington? "We are not denying that there are serious biological problems, like in the U.S. with colony collapse disorder, et cetera," Harder said. "But our argument is that this sort of thing is a short-term episode in a much-longer declining trend that's probably more related to the economics of the honey industry."…

A honey bee, shot by Charles Lam, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license