POLLINATORS POLLINATION AND FOOD PRODUCTION

THE ASSESSMENT REPORT ON POLLINATORS, POLLINATION AND FOOD PRODUCTION
2015). The global expansion of industrialised agriculture
(e.g., conventional and organic) driven by increased or
changing consumption in the developed and emerging
economies will continue to drive habitat changes or
losses in the developing world, and this can be expected
to affect pollinators and pollination. For example, whilst
framed around carbon emissions, Persson et al. (2014)
showed that much of tropical forests are cleared for export
markets. However, direct drivers of change in pollinators
and pollination such as land management and landscape
structure are also strongly influenced by the local or regional
socio-cultural or economic context (Bravo-Monroy et al.,
2015). Food sovereignty may offer an alternative direction
than ever-increasing trade for feeding the world and
reducing negative impacts on ecosystems (Moon, 2011;
Billen et al., 2015; Pirkle et al., 2015).
Pesticide regulations, especially in Europe and the US, led
to business decisions to shift pesticide sales to alternative
markets during the last four decades (Galt, 2008). The lessstringent
environmental regulations in those nations where
alternative markets occur have the potential to exacerbate
local impacts on pollinators (e.g., section 2.3.1.3), yet data
are generally lacking, making accurate assessment difficult.
Furthermore, pesticides banned in developed nations have,
in the recent past, often been used widely on export crops
in developing nations, leading to the re-importation of the
pesticides into developed nations as a contaminent of the
imported food: the so-called “circle of poison” (Galt, 2008).
This has been halted on a large scale due to global changes
in pesticide regulation, production, trade, sales, and use
driven by a number of dynamic economic, social, and
ecological processes (Galt, 2008). Nonetheless, countries
still differ in their regulation of pest management practices,
which creates regulatory asymmetries with unintended
economic and environmental consequences (Waterfield
and Zilberman, 2012). There is a risk that developing
countries may engage in a “race to the bottom” 2 in terms of
environmental standards, a socio-economic phenomenon
where governments deregulate the business or tax
environment to attract or retain economic activity in their
jurisdictions (Porter, 1999; Asici, 2013). Furthermore, where
national support of programmes to reduce pesticide use
has been removed or reduced this has been immediately
followed by increased marketing of pesticide products by
international and local companies, almost independent of
actual need and without consideration of IPM practices
(Thorburn, 2015).
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2. DRIVERS OF CHANGE OF POLLINATORS,
POLLINATION NETWORKS AND POLLINATION
2. “The race to the bottom is a socio-economic phenomenon in which
governments deregulate the business environment or taxes in order
to attract or retain economic activity in their jurisdictions”,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom