벌이 사라지면 인간도 사라진다

일찍이 아인슈타인은 이렇게 말했다.

"지구에서 벌이 사라지면, 인간이라고 4년을 넘겨 살까?(If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live?)"

그런데 사실, 이 말은 아인슈타인이 한 말이 아니라고 한다. 

아무튼 벌이 인간에게 중요하다는 점을 강조하려고 누군가가 지어낸 말이겠지.

그런데... 요즘 벌들이 사라지고 있다.
국내에서 토종 벌은 봉아낭충부패병인가 하는 전염병에, 그리고 다른 나라를 포함해서는 군집붕괴 현상으로...

과학자들이 열심히 그 원인을 찾고 있으니 언젠가는 밝혀지겠지만, 벌이 다 사라지기 전에 그 원인을 찾아야 하는데 큰일이다. 
누구는 휴대폰과 같은 기기의 전자파 때문이라고도 하고, 누구는 농업에서 사용하는 농약 때문이라고도 한다. 아무튼 농업도 그 책임에서 자유로울 수 없을 것이다.

문제는 그렇게 벌들이 사라지면 아인슈타인의 지적처럼 인간도 살 수 없다는 점.
누가 수분을 하랴? 사람이 붓 들고 다니면서 하나하나 할 수도 없고.

수분매개자가 사라지면 농업 생산량의 성장과 안정에 문제가 발생한다는 논문(http://www.pnas.org/content/108/14/5909.abstract).

요약

Human welfare depends on the amount and stability of agricultural production, as determined by crop yield and cultivated area. Yield increases asymptotically with the resources provided by farmers’ inputs and environmentally sensitive ecosystem services. Declining yield growth with increased inputs prompts conversion of more land to cultivation, but at the risk of eroding ecosystem services. To explore the interdependence of agricultural production and its stability on ecosystem services, we present and test a general graphical model, based on Jensen's inequality, of yield–resource relations and consider implications for land conversion. For the case of animal pollination as a resource influencing crop yield, this model predicts that incomplete and variable pollen delivery reduces yield mean and stability (inverse of variability) more for crops with greater dependence on pollinators. Data collected by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations during 1961–2008 support these predictions. Specifically, crops with greater pollinator dependence had lower mean and stability in relative yield and yield growth, despite global yield increases for most crops. Lower yield growth was compensated by increased land cultivation to enhance production of pollinator-dependent crops. Area stability also decreased with pollinator dependence, as it correlated positively with yield stability among crops. These results reveal that pollen limitation hinders yield growth of pollinator-dependent crops, decreasing temporal stability of global agricultural production, while promoting compensatory land conversion to agriculture. Although we examined crop pollination, our model applies to other ecosystem services for which the benefits to human welfare decelerate as the maximum is approached.