While industries carry on polluting the planet with their toxic chemicals, toxic waste and toxic spills, Earth’s pollinators sing a swansong that leaves no doubt as to the foolishness of modern civilisation.
Over the past 20 years, the United States has lost 100-300 billion bees, and the problem has spread to Europe and beyond. While industrialised beekeeping operations do destroy millions of bees each year, a number of other factors play a role in their colossal die-off.
Pollinators are obviously appalled by lack of a varied diet from the tens of millions of monoculture acres. By ingesting genetically modified crops, pollinators also consume GM microbes, to their detriment. However, agrochemicals contribute most to pollinator destruction. In a final, desperate effort to save the hive, some bees off hive cells that contain excessive amounts of pesticide. But even these hives ultimately die.
A sure way to collapse an ecosystem is to annihilate a key species; one from which the entire localised web of life radiates. Pollinators contribute almost 10% to the global food economy, or about €153 billion a year.
Of the 100 or so crop species that provide 90% of the world’s food, bees pollinate 71 of them. Among the 20,000 known bee species worldwide, the honeybee is most important, contributing between €22.8 to €57 billion per annum
Pollinators are keeping score of the corporate war on nature. They are telling us that pesticides and biotechnology are winning. The tragedy is that when pollinators go so will flowering plants and, more than likely, so will we.
Rod Millington
chief editor
