Arron pointed out a consistent typo in my prior posting.

All numbers should have had three more zeroes, as the numbers
were billions of US dollars, not millions. (For those in the UK, this
should read "thousands of millions", not a British billion, which is a
million millions.)

Yes, I was aware of the 2000 update to the Cornell study, but I
hoped to avoid pummeling a deceased horse.

Since Arron has forced my hand, I'll say it - the 2000 Cornell study
CONTINUED to use a methodology that had been perforated with holes
large enough for safe passage of 55-foot tractor-trailer trucks several
years ago.  When both one's peers in the scientific community and
the US General Accounting Office point the same error in one's study,
one can be sure that one has made an error.

The basic flaw in the methodology is that no reasonable person is
going to credit the entire value of ANY crop to pollination alone,
even if pollination is an absolute requirement for that crop.

Think about it - someone still has to plant, tend, harvest, pack,
and ship the crop, someone has to provide the land, water, labor,
and capital equipment.  Do these inputs have no value at all?
Do the bees get all the credit for every penny of crop value?
Of course not.

That sort of "beekeeping bookkeeping" is very similar to the
sort of manipulation of numbers that got Enron into trouble.

Sadly, the net result reduces the entire effort to no more than
"boosterism" and propaganda, when a more conservative position
of "pollination as a significant value-added process with excellent
leverage" would result in widespread consensus.

Funny how the "voice of agrarianism", no matter if it comes from
a single farmer or a gang of trans-national robber-barons like
Arthur Daniels Midland ("ADM - Supermarket to the World")
consistently overstates the case that "agriculture is important" to
the point of prompting disbelief in an otherwise reasonable statement.

David Green's website (http://www.pollinator.com) does a much
better job of making the case for the value of pollination than any
set of numbers.  He has photos of poorly pollinated fruit compared
to properly pollinated fruit.  This side-by-side photo approach has
been used for decades by the makers of "Scott's Miracle Grow"
fertilizer with great success.

Photos are very effective, since they are hard to debate.
If the pen is mightier than the sword, and a picture is worth a
thousand words, then websites and fax machines are the
ultimate weapons.


        jim