Can you imagine how your grocery store will look like in an era without Bees?
One study suggests, mostly as a result of the shift to neonicotinoids, farmland in the US has become 48 times more toxic to bees across 25 years.
When neonicotinoid pesticides were first used on the farmland surrounding Lake Shinji in Japan, from one year to the next the weight of animal plankton in the lake fell by 83%. The fishing community’s catch then fell by more than 90%.
George Monbiot
Despite the weekly swarms, the world’s bee populations are rapidly diminishing. Their depleting numbers won’t just rob a certain NYPD Detective of his job, it’ll also rob us of some of the foods we enjoy—and take for granted—on a daily basis. “Of the 100 crop species that provide 90% of the world’s food, over 70 are pollinated by bees,” explained Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environmental Program in a report about bee populations.
Read more (2014)
Even Bayer and Syngenta’s own (suppressed) research shows that neonicotinoids hammer bees. Read more here.
Beyond the clear harm to bees and its impact on food production, there is the problem of climate change adaptation: the Food Retailers industry has not had a wholesale reckoning of its own climate change impact, let alone an industry-wide conversation about strategic climate change mitigation.
If retailers don’t act now to reduce emissions in their operations on their own terms, they will need to do it later under someone else’s terms…
How do you see the future of your grocery store in the context of the climate crisis and loss of insects everywhere?
In French on a similar subject: L'(Im)-monde d’après
