BELTSVILLE, Maryland (AP) -- Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of America's honeybees could have a devastating effect on the country's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing its people to a glorified bread-and-water diet.
Honeybees do not just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops the country has.
Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.
In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
======
Yikes. No doubt the work of alarmists and we needn't pay any attention to this... or the rising gas prices... or the degradation of the land, air and water... it will all be okay. If we ignore the environment, maybe it will just go away...
4 comments:
Dan, here's another part of the story you might find interesting if not particularly practical or useful. Although I find it immeasurably useful.
The reason the honeybee decline is a serious threat to the food supply has to do with the nature of agribusiness. Lack of honeybees to pollinate the crops listed doesn't result in a crop loss, it only results in a diminished crop, sometimes only a slightly diminished crop.
Let's suppose you are growing (from the list) cukes for your own table and the lack of honeybees as pollinators decreases your yield by 25%. Well, big deal. Instead of slicing up four cukes for that night's salad, you slice up three. Next year you simply plant a quarter more plants and you are little affected.
This same thing might apply to to market gardener. A few less cukes? Raise the price a little and make a little less profit. No big deal.
But the great sprawling mono-cropped agribusiness industrial farms operate on a much, much, much slimmer profit margin, often 5%. Investors put their money into the cuke farm and expect to get a 5% return on their money. Without their investment to buy diesel, fertilizer, water, insecticide, fungicide, herbicide, labor, capital depreciation, and labor the farm cannot operate.
If, because of lack of honeybees to pollinate, the crop falls to 25% of it's expected level, that's a 20% loss instead of a 5% gain for investors and they will not put their money into it.
No capital investment, no farm, no cukes.
In fact, that acreage begins to look very tempting what with the price and subsidy for ethanol corn giving a more sure profit.
Yes, environmental degradation is an important factor in jeopardizing our food supply. But it's only such a devastating factor because of industrial agriculture.
-------------------
By the way, someone wrote the article who apparently knows very little about farming. Soybeans are 'perfect flowered' and do not need a pollinator. Broccoli, celery, and asparagus are harvested for their stalks and unopened flower buds, lack of pollination does not diminish the harvest any.
Yes, the environment for our comfortable lives is going away much faster than most people know. The good news is that the world will continue to exist after we have followed the dinosaurs into extinction. Maybe the next species will do better?
Thanks for the additional info, Eleutheros.
OW, maybe we'll get a second chance...best two out of three?
Ya know, the good Dr. ER's doctoral dissertation had to do with the impact of pesticide drift on honeybee socialization -- just the kind of thing that people laugh off, if paid for by the gubment, as the equivalent of studyin' the sex lives of swamp rats, which, I do not doubt, also would yield information to help us survive ourselves.
I was hosting a newspaper chat room on the topic of 2,4-D, used by ranchers in northwest Texas to control brush, drifting onto cotton fields, pecan orchards and everyday gardens and messing them up. She checked in, the paper being in her hometown, and big fiddle (viola! [it's a bad joke]), we stated flirtin' in IMs and later met and dated and got hitched.
Post a Comment