Published online 16 October 2008 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2008.

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Agriculture unaffected by pollinator declines

Global crop yields have not suffered even though key insect populations have shrunk.

Anna Petherick

Crops may not need quite so many bees for

pollination after all.Punchstock

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.

That's the conclusion of a study by Alexandra

Klein at the University of California, Berkeley,
and her colleagues. Using a data set of global
crop production maintained by the Food and
Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations
(FAO) which spanned 1961 to 2006, they
compared the yields of crops that require
pollinators with those that don't.

They found that crop yields for both crop types

have gone up consistently, seeing average
annual growth rates of about 1.5%. There was
also no difference when the researchers split the
data into crops from developing countries and
crops from developed countries.

And 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.

Underplayed, overplayed

The results, published in Current Biology1, are surprising because several previous studies
have found very large impacts at local scales. Taylor Ricketts, head of conservation group
WWF's conservation science programme, and his colleagues, reported in 2004 that
pollinators increased coffee yields by 20% on plants growing a kilometre or less from
forests in Costa Rica2.

In 2005, a team led by Jacobus Biesmeijer of the University of Leeds, UK, found evidence
of a drop-off in bee diversity in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands3. This coincided
with a decline in outcrossing plant species relative to other sorts of plants.
 And worries about a pollination crisis have found their way into international politics, most
prominently with the establishment of the International Initiative for the Conservation and
Sustainable Use of Pollinators (IPI) at a United Nations meeting in 2000.

But 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
Europe4.

Other data show that native pollinator communities elsewhere exhibit mixed responses to
environmental change, and Ghazoul says that few staple food crops depend on insect
pollinators.

"When the IPI was established, there was some disagreement about how much pollinators
are declining," says Linda Collette, a senior officer on crop associated biodiversity at the
FAO, which oversees the IPI programme.

Hidden threat

Klein says her findings do not necessarily negate that idea that the world is in the throes of
a pollination crisis. The data might hide how farmers have adapted to the problem, she
suggests.

For example, in almond pollination, many growers move honeybees into their orchards and
use pheromones to stimulate foraging activity, she says. Some even place compatible
pollen in the bees' hives so that they transport it to the desired variety of almond. And
many passion-fruit growers in Brazil now pollinate crops by hand.

For the FAO, the increasing reliance on farmworkers rather than insects may not represent
a crisis. "At the end of the day, what's important to the FAO is crop production," says
Collette. "There may be labour costs involved in pollinating crops but there could also be
market benefits if the fruits are better from that, for instance."

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."

This may be more likely as farmers all over the planet start to fill ever more hectares with
pollinator-dependent crops, which contributed 8.4% of total agricultural production in the
developed world in 1961 but 14.7% in 2006. "We assume that the trend will continue as
many biofuels crops, such as canola, oil palm and jatropha, are pollinator-dependent
plants," says Klein.

References

1. Aizen M. A., Garibaldi, L. A., Cunningham, S. A. & Klein, A. M. Curr. Biol.

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2008.08.066 (2008).
2. Ricketts, T. H., Daily, G. C., Ehrlich, P. R. & Michener, C. D. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 101, 12579
12582 (2004).
3. Biesmeijer, J. C. et al. Science 313, 351354 (2008).
4. Ghazoul, J. Trends Ecol. Evol. 20, 367373 (2005).