What bee crisis?
Today I’d like to go back over this Guardian article I tweeted about last week, which brings a new perspective on the bee crisis.
You’ve probably heard of the Colony Collapse Disorder, this phenomenon that has been affecting beehives across North America for the past few years, causing the disappearance of millions of bees. The seriousness of the crisis has been underlined by scientists. Indeed, what would become of our crops if we couldn’t rely on these pollinators? Should we expect a major food crisis?
Flickr user Tie Guy II
Author Nathanael Johnson, however, asks another question: how does this issue fit into the big picture? And comes up with this subsersive answer: the crisis might not be where we thought.
In short, Johnson explains that CCD hasn’t affected food production that badly in North America, where crop productivity hasn’t gone down. What’s more, the number of bees across the world has actually increased, as well as honey production. But this trend isn’t necessarily a good sign. The global production of pollinator-dependent crops has been growing at a much faster pace than those that don’t rely on bees, in a way that could disturb ecosystems. The culprit? Products such as cashews and chocolate, whose demand worldwide has been growing. How much can this system sustain itself without reaching a plateau, or an environmental crisis? Nobody knows yet, but according to Johnson, things don’t look to good.
The crisis they foresee is one driven not by mysterious die-offs but by market pressures plainly visible in the produce aisle. It has to do with people in poor nations developing an appetite for good cocoa and coffee. It has to do with people in wealthy countries assuming that tomatoes will be ripe and readily available year-round. Bee scarcity, in other words, is an economic problem caused by economic forces.
This article caught my attention not only because of the original thesis it brings forward, but also because I’ve been studying the new waves of specialty coffee and chocolate in North America. I had never thought that these trends could have such environmental implications, yet this is a perfect example of the butterfly effect. “Chocolate depends on pollinators, and yields from cocoa farms have doubled since 1961,” writes Johnson. This raises the same question asked by the meat slaughterers I wrote about two weeks ago: do you know what it takes to produce your food?