Back in 2005 the Labour Party published a document attacking 100 (alleged) spending commitments the Liberal Democrats had made, including one which accurately quoted Vince Cable from his website:
Twickenham has one of the best bee keeping centres in the country. Many local people support it. Benefits from bees’ natural pollination activities are enormous, worth billions of pounds. There is however negligible research into damaging diseases and I have pressed the ministry of agriculture for a bigger research commitment.
Oh, how Labour laughed back then at the absurdity of the idea that money should be spent on hard working bees rather than on hard working families.
But now? Since Vince Cable led the way in the political field in taking the plight of our bees seriously the issue has gained increasing attention and support from across the political spectrum. The latest is a report from the cross-party Public Accounts Committee (via I Spy Strangers):
A committee of MPs has accused the government of being indifferent to the health of honeybees, despite the fact they pollinate crops worth £200m a year to the British economy.
The Public Accounts Committee published its report into measures the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is taking to prevent, identify and control notifiable diseases affecting livestock and honeybees.
Edward Leigh MP, Chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts, said:
“Honeybees are dying and colonies are being lost at an alarming rate.
“This is very worrying and not just because the pollination of crops by honeybees is worth an estimated £200 million each year to the British economy.
“So it is difficult to understand why Defra has taken so little interest in the problem up to now.
“Additional money for research into honeybee health has been announced but the focus will include all pollinating insects.
“We need to know from the department what proportion of the funding is to be ring-fenced specifically for research into the causes of the decline in honeybee numbers.”
There are rather more high profile issues on which the course of events has proven Vince right, but congratulations on adding another one to the list.
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once again, lol @ the Labour party…
So it stops being an unfunded spending commitment if it’s a good use of public money, does it?
I don’t follow Vince’s logic, here.
If bee keepers want disease free bees, why can they not pay for it themselves? If there is a £200m (forgive the economic jargon) positive externality in bees pollenating plants, will farmers not fund the research rather than see their crops fail?
Why does the taxpayer always have to pick up the tab?
Perhaps voter turnout among beekeepers is high.
In theory, yes. In practice, no.
Firstly, it requires farmers to see that it’s in their self interest to fund research into bees. As we know, people sometimes aren’t very good at looking at their own long-term self interest, especially when the threats are distant (e.g. climate change), and the immediate outlays are relatively large.
Secondly, the nature of the agricultural sector in this country is one of small holders. It isn’t as if an agribusiness company can suddenly gift a £200,000 research grant, as it might in the States. Such a research grant would require a lot of smaller contributions from a lot of different individuals – that’s simply how the market’s structured in this country.
Thirdly, agriculture is currently facing hard times. Actually, agriculture always seems to be facing hard times – there hasn’t been a times since the repeal of the Corn Laws when it hasn’t seemed to be in decline. Agriculture simply hasn’t go the capital.
There are potentially other funding sources – beekeepers themselves, the consumer, large retailers. But plainly, those with the will (beekeepers most notably) haven’t got the capital, and those with the capital (retailers) haven’t got the will. After all, retail doesn’t see it as its job to fund R&D, or else Tesco would be involved in everything from bee diseases to the disposal of cathode ray tubes to the macroeconomics of pet insurance, and beekeepers usually make little or no profit on their work (which is often a hobby).
I suppose that this is a good example of how the market is quite ‘lumpy’, with the structure of individual sectors and the psychology of those involved leading to results that are sometimes not in the interest of anyone in the long term (see the current economic crisis for yet another example!). Vince Cable has made this liberal pragmatism his own over the past few years, and so it’s no surprise that he’s involved in pushing for this funding in the first place.
Well, Tom, why don’t YOU pay for it? If our crops fail because there’s no bees to pollinate then, you’ll starve along with the rest of us.
There’s no one person in particular who’ll profit from this, so no one person is willing to pay for it. All of us will lose quite a lot if the worst case scenario happens, but no-one will be the first to say “I’ll pay for it”, we all sit around waiting for someone else to do it. Until, in the very worst case scenario, we all die.
We in this country are remarkably complacent and ignorant about our food supply, witness Tom’s utterly stupid point. Similarly, note how the Potato Council is so often brought up when people are doing the “hah hah, silly quangoes” routine. That one actually is industry funded, not taxpayer funded, by the way.
One of the main tasks of the Potato Council is to guard against potato blight. Which not so long ago led to the death of a huge proportion of people in our neighbouring island.
The problem of the declining and potential risk to future food supplies and distortion of food chain,caused by the decline in the population of common honey bees, in the UK, has been brought to public attention, by Vince Cable.
Now the Chair of Public Accounts has demanded Government Defra policy, to properly address bee keeping in the UK and carry out proper funded research, to find why 250,000 bee colonies are victims of `Colony Collapse Disorder’.
It is essential for our largely unregistered amateur bee keepers,farmers and academic researchers to now work closely together across England,Wales and Scotland.
They all must now look at the same pool of knowledge,experience to research the solution to the problem of this epidemic, that is currently wiping out over a third of the bee population in the UK.
The recommendation is to register Bee keeping and to put the industry on a more regulatory footing, in the future.
Einstein said that if honey bee colonies collapse, then the human race will also be lost.