Category: Valuation

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What is the value of pollinators?

Exactly a year ago yesterday Jeremy wrote a post about the dollar value of pollination as an ecosystem service. Now comes an article in Gaia which argues that previous criticism of such valuations in the same journal are unfounded. ((Alexandra-Maria Klein, Roland Olschewski and Claire Kremen. 2008. The Ecosystem Service Controversy: Is There Sufficient Evidence for a “Pollination Paradox”? GAIA 17/1:12–16.)) A year is a long time in science.

The criticism in question was based on the observation that “crops depend on pollinators but crop yield does not necessarily depend on pollinators as other factors are likely to limit crop production.” Jaboury Ghazoul called this the “pollination paradox” ((Ghazoul, J. 2007. Recognising the complexities of ecosystem management and the ecosystem service concept. GAIA 16/3: 215–221.)) in an article which argued that it is impossible to value ecosystem services individually.

The authors of the latest paper dissect the situation with coffee and almond and conclude that “there is currently no evidence for a pollination paradox.” However, they do say that recent figures for the monetary value of pollination may well be media-driven overestimates. Even the often-seen figure that “one third of the caloric value of our food is derived from animal pollination … is still not well supported.” That pollinators are important to food production is not contested. But how important is perhaps not as easy to calculate as has been made out.

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On the ground in West Bengal

In West Bengal, a penniless activist is preserving 542 local varieties of rice on a teeny farm. It’s an amazing story, as Josh Kearns tells it. He visited Debal Deb’s research station and blogged about it here.

Folk traditions that were widely practiced until just a few generations ago, such as valuing seeds in non-monetary terms and freely sharing resources, have been sacrificed under market culture. Since Debal gives his seeds away for free, he runs the risk of their not being appropriately valued; whereas, if a farmer takes out a huge loan to buy Monsanto’s HYV seeds and they fail to produce a satisfactory yield (or fail altogether, which happens frequently), he blames himself for being a lousy farmer rather than Monsanto for ripping him off.

Just one of the problems of taking care of crop biodiversity outside the mainstream. Kearns does not say that Deb is no ordinary agroconservationist. He’s a friend of a friend, as it happens, and has a PhD from Calcutta University and several published papers and a book to his name.

Still, Kearns reports that against the odds, Debal Deb is succeeding. And while that is good news, I do wonder what the next stage is. OK, so he and his crew are conserving and describing the varieties (to forestall a rights-grab). But there must be ways both to support that work and to make use of the biodiversity to improve lives.