Overall, we must conclude that claims of a global crisis in agricultural pollination are untrue.
That’s from a New Scientist digest of a Current Biology paper by the authors themselves.1 Roughly, the argument is that (1) bees are responsible for the production of a lot of our food, yes, but not that much; (2) pollinators are declining, yes, but not worldwide, and probably not irreversibly; and (3) pollinator decline can threaten agricultural yield, yes, but it hasn’t actually done so yet. The data come from a huge FAO dataset of “yield, and total production and cultivated area of pollinator-dependent and nondependent crops.”
But not so fast. The relatively small proportion of agricultural production that depends on pollinators has quadrupled during the past 50 years. So if there’s no pollinator crisis now, there may well soon be one.
Footnotes:- Thanks to Michael for the headsup. [↩]
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Jeremy blogged about the original paper last year.
If you read French… or English, a detailed report from the French Food Security Agency on the weakening, collapse and mortality of bee colonies at:
http://www.afssa.fr/Documents/SANT-Ra-MortaliteAbeilles.pdf
An a politician’s report , in French only, at:
http://www.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf/10.10.08_Rapport-Saddier_cle5c9d62-1.pdf
You may be impressed by the suggestion to place the bee on the UNESCO World Heritage List.