Agriculture unaffected by pollinator declines

The Nature web site, on the 16th October 2008, has an article about a report that found that bee declines were not affecting crop yields. It says,

Bees and many other insects may be in decline almost everywhere — but agriculture that depends on pollinators has been surprisingly unaffected at the global scale.

When the researchers compared crops that are cultivated almost exclusively in tropical regions, they found no difference between the success of insect-pollinated crops — such as oil palm, cocoa and the Brazil nut — and those crops that need only the breeze to spread their pollen.

Some scientists think that the pollinator crisis is overplayed. Jaboury Ghazoul, a plant ecologist at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, has argued that it is driven mainly by reported declines of crop-pollinating honeybees in North America and bumblebees and butterflies in Europe.

However, Klein points out that a sudden drop in crop yields could be just around the corner. "There could be a more widespread threshold effect coming," she says, "especially if the honeybee problems get worse in places like California."

The decline in bee numbers is not a big problem nor is it going to mean mass starvation. So the scare stories that popup every now and then can be ignored.