Wednesday, January 19, 2011
Honeybees: a perfect example of negative externalities and market failure
See the graphic here or video here. Note the impact of the loss of bees on agriculture and food production. What exactly is the market failure here and how should it be addressed? (tax or regulate or ignore are our basic choices when dealing with externalities)
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I feel that the market failure here would negative externalities and, possibly, informational failure too. Negative externality simply because the pesticides could/are having a negative impact on the bees and information failure because we use a lot of pesticides while we most definitely are unaware of all the harmful effects of these chemicals on the bees. I would think intervention (through taxing and otherwise) is the call of the hour if and only if the impact of the loss of bees is going to be significant on our food production. Then again though, we will have to consider the trade off between the use of less effective pesticides/less amounts of pesticides/pesticides being more costly and not used and the effects of all these on the food production as well and then after comparing the different scenarios decide how much to tax/regulate if at all.
ReplyDeleteI would regulate pesticides. Pesticides not only negatively impact bees, who in turn provide pollination to 23% of our agriculture, but the run off affects fresh water eco systems as well.
ReplyDeleteThe US could feed itself before industrial agriculture. There has to be a solution to feed our ever increasing population with out creating surpluses and hurting bumbly bees
I'm not sure what the current regulatory measures are when measuring pesticides, but if it is indeed causing so many negative externalities than I believe we should tighten the leash. I understand pesticides are very important towards agriculture and I definately would need more information before I could determine the best measure to take, but I never knew bees had such a powerful effect on our food supply and plant life! Is there any way this type of polinalization could be preformed by man?
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