Why bees matter: The importance of bees and other pollinators for food and agriculture

This brochure aims to raise awareness on the role of bees and other pollinators in increasing food security and fighting hunger as well as in providing key ecosystem services for agriculture. It will be launched on the occasion of the first observance of World Bee Day.

TINY MIRACLE WORKERS

Pollination is vital to life on our planet. Bees and other pollinators have thrived for millions of years, ensuring food security and nutrition, and maintaining biodiversity and vibrant ecosystems for plants, humans and the bees themselves.

Pollinators are essential to the production of many of the micronutrient rich fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and oils we eat. In fact, close to 75 percent of the world’s crops producing fruits and seeds for human consumption depend, at least in part, on pollinators for sustained production, yield and quality. The diversity of food available is largely owed to animal pollinators. But alarmingly, in a number of regions, pollination services are showing declining trends.

In the past, this service was provided by nature at no apparent cost. As farm fields have become larger, agricultural practices have also changed, focussing on a narrower list of crops and increasing the use of pesticides. Mounting evidence points to these factors as causes to the potentially serious decline in populations of pollinators. The decline is likely to impact the production and costs of vitamin-rich crops like fruits and vegetables, leading to increasingly unbalanced diets and health problems, such as malnutrition and non-communicable diseases. Maintaining and increasing yields in horticultural crops under agricultural development is important to health, nutrition, food security and better incomes for smallholder farmers.

The process of securing effective pollinators to ‘service’ agricultural fields is proving difficult to engineer, and there is a renewed interest in helping nature provide pollination services through practices that support wild pollinators.

BIRDS, BEES, BATS AND MORE

So, what are they? Everyone knows about the bees, and there are some 20 000 species of wild bees that pollinate plants but it may come as a surprise to know that moths, flies, wasps, beetles and butterflies as well as some animals pollinate plants. Vertebrate pollinators include bats, non-flying mammals, including several species of monkey, rodents, lemur, tree squirrels, olingo and kinkajou, and birds such as hummingbirds, sunbirds, honeycreepers, and some parrot species.

The abundance and diversity of pollinators ensure the sustained provision of pollination services to multiple types of plants and lead to better food.

POLLINATION: INVISIBLE TO THE EYE BUT YIELDING GREAT RETURNS IN AGRICULTURE

Pollination is the highest agricultural contributor to yields worldwide, contributing far beyond any other agricultural management practice. Thus, bees and other pollinators make important contributions to agriculture. Pollinators affect 35 percent of global agricultural land, supporting the production of 87 of the leading food crops worldwide. Plus, pollination-dependent crops are five times more valuable than those that do not need pollination. The price tag of global crops directly relying on pollinators is estimated to be between US$235 and US$577 billion a year. And their quantity is on the rise. The volume of agricultural production dependent on pollinators has increased by 300 percent in the last 50 years. These figures reflect the importance that pollinators have in sustaining livelihoods across the planet. Several of the crops produced with pollination, cocoa, and coffee, to name two examples, provide income for farmers, in particular smallholder farmers and family farms, especially in developing countries.

Bees can, in a sense, be considered livestock. With the increasing commercial value of honey, bees are becoming a growing generator of income, livelihood strategy, and means of food security for many small-scale producers and forest dwellers in many developing countries.

Clearly, the benefits that bees and other small pollinators bring us to go beyond human food. Thanks to these pollinators, farm animals have diverse forage sources and hence more flexibility to adapt to an increasingly changing climate. And we also have certain medicines, biofuels, fibers, and construction materials. Some species also provide materials such as beeswax for candles and musical instruments. So embedded in our lives, bees and other pollinators have long inspired art, music, and even sacred passages.