Pollination economics explained

Four different numbers, routinely confused

The headline figure, and what it is

The widely quoted global pollination value comes from a 2009 paper in Ecological Economics. Its method is transparent: take each crop's dependence on animal pollination from the published crop-by-crop assessment, multiply by that crop's market value in a reference year, and sum. What comes out is an estimate of the market value of the portion of world crop production attributable to animal pollinators in that year.

The IPBES pollinator assessment reviews this literature and is the better citation for the state of the field, precisely because it reports the range and the assumptions rather than a single headline.

What the biology actually says

The crop-by-crop assessment behind all of it has a finding worth stating on its own: the crops supplying most of the world's calories — wheat, rice, maize and the other cereals — do not depend on animal pollination at all. Dependence is concentrated in fruit, nuts, vegetables and some oilseeds, which matter enormously for dietary diversity, micronutrients and farm income, and much less for bulk calories.

So 'a third of our food depends on bees' is a claim about the diversity and value of what we eat rather than about whether we would starve. That is a defensible and interesting statement; the starvation version is not.

And honey bees are not the whole of it

Managed honey bees are the pollinator that can be delivered by lorry, which is why they dominate paid pollination. They are not the most effective pollinator of every crop, and wild bees and other insects contribute substantially — unpaid, unmeasured in any market, and in many cases declining. A market price exists for the manageable service and not for the rest, which is a fact about markets rather than about ecology.