In this blog for World Bee Day 2025, Dr Tom Breeze, Senior Research Fellow in Sustainable Land Management, explains why the responsibility for conserving pollinators extends beyond those who work the land.
For decades, researchers have been demonstrating how important bees and other pollinating insects are to producing crops. Our own research has demonstrated that not only does pollination underpin millions of pounds of crop production every year, but that shortfalls of pollination can cost farmers thousands of pounds a year.
With the continuing pressure from land use and climate change, we have very real reasons to be concerned about pollinator declines.
If pollination drops, production drops with it, and prices will continue to rise for all of us.
The ripple effect
But this is all common sense isn’t it? We know bees are important for crops and we know what to do, so why do we need to keep doing research to show how valuable they are?
Simply, it’s a matter of scale.
Unless you buy directly from a farmer, a whole range of people and businesses are going to be involved in transporting, packing and selling your food, each of which will benefit from there being more of that crop available.
While fresh produce is a key part of our diets, a lot of what we grow gets processed into other foods, like juices, jams and sweets, as part of our multi-billion pound food industry.
(Photo by Karen Cann on Unsplash)
So it’s not just that losing a lot of bees in Kent will push up prices for apples, it’s the knock-on effects that this will have on the price of everything apple related – from apple juice and cider to baby food and chutneys – unless we start relying even more on imports.
Speaking of trade, the UK is already one of the biggest importers of pollinated crops globally. We have whole industries, which employ thousands of people built around pollinated crops we cannot grow ourselves like coffee and cocoa. Many of these are often concentrated in only a few countries.
It’s not just fruits and vegetables either – so much of the food we eat is part of an industry that spans sectors. The meat and dairy sectors rely on pollinated protein crops like soy to sustain their livestock, and material crops like cotton and linseed that are used by other major industries are all likely to be affected when bees start to die back. Indeed, most of the spices in your favourite curry, majboos or stir fry would likely go completely extinct without pollination.
All of this leaves us very exposed to the loss of pollinators outside of our own shores. One of our research projects demonstrated that if 25 countries who are most vulnerable to natural disasters were to lose pollinators, we would be billions worse off as a country, even though we are not directly affected.
At the same time, there are a lot of discussions about making the UK more self-sufficient, by taking advantage of new technology and a warming climate to grow new crops.
But many of these new crops like buckwheat, sunflower, soy and peach will still need pollinators to support them and we don’t know if native British bees will be effective at this – and even if they will, they may get pushed out by climate change.
Sharing the responsibility
Despite how many people benefit from them, most of the burden to protect bees has come on farmers and other land managers, often with public money. Although these people benefit from pollination, it’s quite likely that the rest of the food system is benefiting as much or even more than them.
Thankfully, we are not the only ones who recognise this. Around the world, many businesses are concerned about how vulnerable they are to declines in bees but don’t yet have the tools, understanding and expertise to actually address this. Getting these businesses on side could help unlock support for bee conservation around the world.
So, we have teamed up with partners across Europe, including several international businesses to create VALOR, a major research project funded by the European Union’s flagship Horizon Research programme.
VALOR will work to address the major gaps in our knowledge and develop new tools to allow policymakers, farmers and wider businesses to better understand how vulnerable they are to pollinator losses, and what they can do about it.
At the same time, in the AGRI4POL and RestPoll projects we are working with farmers and policymakers to develop more cost-effective means to support pollinators, using the decades of experience we have to develop innovative solutions that respect, rather than distort the way that farmers work.
Projects like these represent an important change – showing that pollinator protection shouldn’t fall only to farmers but across the whole food system. By bringing farmers, researchers, businesses and policymakers together, we’re creating practical approaches to pollinator conservation that share both the effort and the benefits more evenly, recognising that this is a challenge that affects us all.