20. The Price of Coviability: Pollination at All Costs. Legal Approach to the New Relationship Between Man and Pollinators

Over the centuries, man has been closely dependent on pollinators, whilst barely noticing them. It has taken their decline under man’s influence for us to better understand their benefits and envisage what their disappearance could cost us. It is in economic terms that the issue has been addressed by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, as it was addressed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): they have highlighted the importance of “pollination services” and at the same time raised the problem of the payment of such services and the cost of maintaining them. In this case, the service is considered in mutualistic terms, the environmental service that man provides for pollinators, in order to ensure the eco-systemic service of certain pollinators for man. This necessary association with the “labor” of pollinators, once again calls into question the relationships between man and insects and obliges us to develop new legal instruments in order to manage them and ensure the production of these services. These means are mostly conventional: pollination agreements consequently allow bees to be assigned to the pollination of orchards and other crops in exchange for service remuneration. However, these agreements question the legitimacy of payment, just as they question ownership of the service by the beekeepers seeking payment for the service provided by their bees, vital for plant production, while this service remains uncertain and difficult to control. Moreover, a price is omitted from these contracts: the price which is “borne” by the pollinators made available, undermined by transhumance, not to mention the potential risks to biodiversity. “Protection” agreements complement “exploitation” agreements in order to ensure a coexistence between the human occupation of soils and pollinators, in the form of “floral fallow” or “late mowing”, or even “biodiversity” agreements, for the purpose of compensating the crop losses linked to the lack of or reduction in pesticide treatments on plants during the pollination period in order to avoid killing bees. The man-pollinator co-existence consequently organized must not be misleading however: it betrays the fact that the economy is firmly appropriating nature, an ownership which obliges us to place a value on a function which until now, has always been free of charge. It does however permit us to find a pretext to protect it.