Pollinator Decline Threatens Africa’s Food Crops

In Murang’a County, Kenya, avocado farmers were losing more than a quarter of their potential fruit to poor pollination. Researchers at the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology found that simply adding two honeybee colonies to a smallholder farm reversed that loss entirely, lifting avocado yields by one hundred eighty per cent and adding around one hundred sixty-eight dollars in income per farmer in a single season.

That kind of gap, a crop underperforming for want of enough bees to pollinate it, is quietly widespread across African farmland. More than seventy-five per cent of the world’s food crops depend on pollinators to some degree, and across the continent that list includes coffee, cocoa, cotton, sesame, mango, and watermelon, alongside avocado.

A Different Crisis Than The One In The Headlines

Much of the global conversation about bee decline centres on colony collapse in the United States and Europe, driven largely by the varroa mite and the diseases it spreads. African honeybees appear to tell a different story. Research published through iCIPe and reported in PLOS ONE found that honeybee populations in East Africa are largely resistant or tolerant to the parasites and pathogens devastating colonies elsewhere.

“The common causes for colony losses in the United States and Europe, parasites, pathogens, and pesticides, do not seem to be affecting Kenyan bees, at least not yet,” said Christina Grozinger, an entomologist at Penn State University who worked on the research.

That resilience does not mean African pollinators are safe. Icipe’s own review of bee health across the continent points to a different combination of pressures, land cover change, rising pesticide use, and climate change, as the main drivers of decline, even where the mite crisis has largely spared local bee populations.

What the Numbers Show

The scale of what pollinators contribute is becoming clearer as researchers measure it directly. In Burkina Faso, a controlled study found that excluding bees from cotton and sesame fields cut yields by thirty-seven per cent and fifty-nine per cent, respectively, while full pollination lifted output by as much as sixty-two per cent. In Rwanda, researchers estimated that insect pollinators unlock more than one hundred million dollars in crop production value each year.

A nine-country survey of Sub-Saharan beekeepers covering the 2022 to 2023 season, including Nigeria, Benin, Kenya, and Ethiopia, found that beekeepers who had received training in modern management practices lost significantly fewer colonies than those who had not, about twenty per cent compared with a much higher loss rate among untrained beekeepers. Unlike the mite-driven collapse dominating headlines elsewhere, the gap in Africa often comes down to something more fixable: access to training and basic beekeeping support.

Nigeria’s Slow Start on Pollinator Policy

Nigeria has begun organising around the issue, though the effort is still young. In 2019, Nigerian civil society groups, government officials, and scientists joined a regional dialogue in Nairobi convened under the BES-Net programme, aimed at building shared strategy around pollinator conservation across English-speaking Africa. The Nigerian delegation started with six people who had not previously worked together. It has since grown to twenty-six members coordinating across sectors on the issue.

That kind of coordination matters because pollinator decline rarely shows up as a single dramatic event. It shows up as a slowly shrinking avocado harvest, a cotton field that yields less than it should, and a beekeeper who cannot explain why this year’s honey came in lighter than last year’s.

What This Means For African Farmers

For a farmer growing avocado, cotton, sesame, or any of the dozens of other pollinator-dependent crops common across Nigeria and the wider region, the reassuring part of this picture is that the disease crisis crippling beekeeping in the United States has not, so far, taken the same toll here. The less reassuring part is that land clearing, pesticide use, and a warming climate are still real and growing pressures, and that most farmers have little access to the kind of beekeeping training the nine-country survey found makes such a measurable difference.

Groups like icipe continue working on practical, Africa-specific tools, including domesticating stingless bee species as alternative pollinators for crops like cucumber and macadamia. Whether that kind of work reaches ordinary smallholders in time depends less on the biology, which increasingly looks favourable, and more on whether training, funding, and policy attention catch up to it.