Category: Threats

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Battling risk

Here’s how Jeffrey Sachs starts a recent article in Scientific American:

Life at the bottom of the world’s income distribution is massively risky. Households lack basic buffers — saving accounts, health insurance, water tanks, diversified income sources and so on — against droughts, pests and other hazards. The bodies of the poor often lack enough nutrients to rebuff diseases. Even modest shocks, such as a temporary dry spell or a routine infection, can be devastating. 

He uses this platform to launch a plea for innovative forms of insurance, things like weather-linked bonds combined with other financial services for farmers. The Millennium Village of Sauri in Kenya has apparently been having some encouraging experiences with such instruments, and they certainly seem worth exploring and testing. Anything that helps farmers manage risk must be welcome.

But what about the best agricultural insurance policy of all? What about agricultural biodiversity, in all its guises? Not much — or any, in fact — talk about agrobiodiversity from Prof. Sachs, beyond that “and so on.”

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Bee shortage? What bee shortage?

An article in the New York Times this week suggests that the current scare over colony collapse disorder is nothing extraordinary. It has happened before and will probably happen again. What has been missing from the debate, some scientists say, is historical context. Records show that colonies were vanishing in the 19th century, when the cause was seen as lack of moral fibre. Bees that weren’t returning to their hives had “weak character”. And it happened in the late 1970s, when it was called “disappearing disease”. The disease too disappeared, and no cause was ever isolated.

One day we may know, and extra money for long-term monitoring (none has been forthcoming) may help. In the meantime, if the “crisis” has helped people appreciate the importance of bees as pollinators, and prompted deeper investigations, then that is surely A Good Thing. To prove the point, two deeply fascinating papers have been published in the past month showing that genetic diversity in honeybees and other social insects is also A Good Thing.

This is counterintuitive, because the reason social insects are social is that they are genetically uniform.

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