Remember the ballyhoo over Colony Collapse Disorder? Sure you do. At one point gullible Americans were being shamed into thinking their cell phones would be responsible for the Bee Holocaust and subsequent starvation of the entire planet once all the crops died off for want of pollination.
A new paper released by the Property and Environment Resource Center shows how market forces worked to mitigate the problem. As PERC puts in the press release:
Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious phenomenon affecting honey bees … is a real problem that not long ago produced headlines such as “Bee Colony Collapses Could Threaten U.S. Food Supply” (Associated Press, May 3, 2007).
Two prominent agricultural economists, Randy Rucker and Wally Thurman, look at the bee problem in a new light. The problem still exists but gets little news because, once again, the sky did not fall. People in the beekeeping industry reacted to the problem so swiftly that pollination continued and the food supply was saved.
The paper is well worth the read. I would maintain that not only is it not a coincidence that market forces solved the problem in the absence of government action, but that government inaction was the necessary and proper response: it gave the world’s ultimate resource enough room to work solving the problem.
HT: Benita Dodd on Twitter.
