Study Finds Pollinators Contribute 20% of Key Nutrients and 44% of Farm Income in Remote Nepali Villages

A study published last month in the journal Nature found that pollinators supplied more than 20% of vitamin A, vitamin E and folate intake and 44% of farming income for residents of 10 remote villages in Nepal’s Jumla district. Researchers tracked diets, crop yields and farming income over one year while counting pollen granules on bees to measure interactions with local crops.

The work provides the first direct evidence tying pollinator activity to measurable human-health outcomes.

Jumla district lies at the end of the Karnali highway, the sole land route through the Himalayas, leaving its 120,000 residents almost entirely dependent on what they grow. Local beekeepers have reported that roughly half their bees have disappeared over the past decade.

Thomas Timberlake, an ecologist at the University of York who led the study, said the communities are especially exposed because they lack trade links and cash to import food if local fruit and vegetable yields fall.

4 million malnutrition-related deaths worldwide each year. Sam Myers, director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health and a co-author of that study, later led 2022 research published in Environmental Health Perspectives that linked current shortfalls in pollination to roughly 500,000 additional deaths annually.

That 2022 analysis, drawing on data from hundreds of farms, found that between 3% and 5% of global vegetable, fruit and nut production is already lost to inadequate pollination.

Myers noted that managed honeybees have not offset losses among wild pollinators. The 2016 IPBES assessment estimated that more than 40% of bee species may be threatened globally. In 2025 the IUCN Red List listed at least 172 European bee species as at risk of extinction.

About three-quarters of agricultural crops depend on pollinators. Roughly 80% of the world’s population relies on herbal medicine for primary health care, and ecologists estimate that insects pollinate about 28,000 medicinal plant species. Four years ago Lucas Garibaldi, director of an agroecology institute in Argentina, found only two peer-reviewed modelling studies connecting pollinators to human health.

He said clearer measurements of these benefits can help communicate the case for conservation. Timberlake’s team calculated that planting wildflowers, providing nesting sites and cutting pesticide use could raise farmer incomes by up to 30% and lift 9% of Jumla’s population out of nutrient deficiency.

NGOs are now working with Nepal’s government to draft a national pollinator strategy based on those findings.