Quote:
Originally Posted by octothorp
It's a little more complicated than that. Many plants don't need pollination. Some need pollination, but not from bees. Some need pollination from honey bees. Some need pollination from non-honey (typically native north-american) bees. The article is talking specifically about commercial honey bee hives, which are extremely useful and versatile pollinators.
The problem isn't ever going to be scarcity of food in general. There's plenty of arable land, and there are plenty of edible crops with no need for pollination (including many livestock feed crops). It's going to be scarcity of particular types of food that are critical parts of our food industry. There's going to be a real fight between different food producers for control of the existing bee pollinators. In some parts of the US, this is already happening where, for example, carrot producers are complaining that their crops are not being pollinated because of nearby canola fields that the bees are more interested in pollinating. Over time, we may see that pollinated crops are simply grown less, and non-pollinated crops are grown more, the availability of some increase, others decrease, some things go up in price, some things stay more or less the same.
This looks like a pretty good list of pollinated crops. Take particular note of those that have great or essential need for honey bee pollinators. Those are the ones that will be heavily affected:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...inated_by_bees
edit: There are really three solutions here:
One is to solve the problem of what's killing the honey bees.
The second is to prioritize our food supply, so that essential foods get pollinated while relative luxury foods become even more of a luxury. It would be ridiculous if the long-term effect is that the price of green vegetables like broccoli make them unavailable to low income households, as more emphasis is put on pollinating nuts and other non-vital crops.
The third solution, obviously, is Robot bees. (Which I say jokingly, but in fifteen years this might be a viable part of the solution). |
All great points. I should also offer that I'm not laying all the blame at the feet of corporations. In fact, if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't be able to feed the people the world does have right now. Or at least as close as we are doing it right now. The world is vastly overpopulated and that's easily the biggest problem but no one wants to address that, it goes against our very nature.
I'm just so upset that when we see a problem like this, and it is a problem, that we aren't able to act right away. This certain chemical is killing the bees? Get rid of it! Too easy right?
But no, we have to have a whole discussion, and all the people with money or a stake in something have to put out lobbied 'evidence' that contradicts our best minds as the problem gets worse. Just so they can stay at the top of the food chain.
This really needs to stop, we're reaching a pivotal point in environmental issues. We can't have a 20 year discussion on every important topic.
Funny enough we did solve the CFC problem pretty well. Went hard on that almost right out of the gate. What happened to that spirit? Can we do it again? Have the lobbies gotten too big and too powerful?