I'm a believer in taking advantage of GM crops but also believe that some kind of regulation should be put in place to ensure that those crops yield seeds that can be used to plant future generations.
If these crops are designed to require you to buy from a producing company each year, that just seems so fundamentally artificial and going against the grain of all of our agricultural history. And I can see how much of a slippery slope it can represent... ayou read about farmer suicides in India related to this topic. I bring this up because the fact that none of this is discussed in the article makes me fear it's got a profit agenda.
Most farmers don't save seed for replanting anymore even if they're non GMO, especially if they want to be economically competitive. The $50-150/acre that seeds cost are a small fraction of the benefit of using F1 hybrid seeds due to hybrid vigor - the plants they produce have a higher yield that more than makes up for it, on the order of 15-50% higher depending on variety.
The seeds they get from a manufacturer also mature more consistently and uniformly, they do a much better job of cleaning and protecting the seed (e.g. fungicide), and usually end up costing less than doing it yourself because of the labor involved in preparing the seed for storage.
If it's economically advantageous to buy the seeds anyway then why do the manufacturers legally prohibit the farmers to save the seeds? Wouldn't the farmers naturally pick the option that yields them the most profit?
I feel like this kind of discussion hinges on a misguided belief that farmers are not very smart businessmen. The idea that a farmer would abandon their current crop for GMO crop that they cannot replant without making a cost-benefit analysis in their head just strikes me as very odd. These peoples life depend on making such decisions, we should trust them to make them themselves.
In a multi-agent dynamic system, the optimal actions by each individual agents (based on whatever cost-benefit analysis they do) can evolve the system into a state where every agent is worse off compared to some initial state. This holds even if every individual agent is a "smart businessperson".
One main purpose of law and social rules is to prevent multi-agent systems from getting stuck into these global non-optimal states. And arguing that agents are smart is not a counter-argument to this.
As an extreme example, I'd add -- in some cases, because of market conditions (and perhaps the legal climate as well), within a given financial year a farmer may be forced to choose between purchasing GMO seeds and having to sell the farm, especially if the farm already used licensed GMO seeds in a prior year.
But as you pointed out, without legal and regulatory guardrails, the system at large can become badly suboptimal long before compromise-or-die dichotomies arise.
This is true in the abstract but I don’t see how it applies to this specific case. There are two agents here and the GMO plants will only be planted if planting them is the optimal choice for both.
If you are a farmer who has the choice of planting more productive plants or not, if you do not, you will be at a disadvantage and eventually will be outcompeted in the market if you don't "defect". Planting the GMO is the optimal choice if you want to survive in the short term, even if you can see disaster looming in the long term despite sweet supplier promises.
Once everyone is using the proprietary seeds, the price magically goes up and the farmers have less money than they had before, but the biotech company now gets a cut of every grain of wheat which has to increase year on year (growth!). This isn't the only negative outcome you could imagine.
A classic multipolar trap for the farmers because they all made an entirely rational decision at every stage and yet they all ended up worse off in the end. And a trap agrotech will be extremely happy to coax farmers into.
For their part, if they don't do it, a less scrupulous company would and so they need to do it or get outcompeted - not only must they grow, they just grow faster than the competition to survive long term. And so they are also a trap of their own where they could end up in a strongly negative situation (angry mobs after their blood, say) despite making what was both an optimal and necessary decision at every step.
Which is not to say you can't or even shouldn't use biotech to increase crop yield. It's just that you can't rely on people making rational choices for themselves to produce long-term overall good outcomes.
The agents are numerous, as pointed out by sibling comment.
The farmer agents only make decisions based on personal profitability. The overall system after some years can evolve to a state where some of the following are true:
- the GMO seed maker acquires a monopoly over certain types of seeds, which enables it to reduce farmer profits to below what they were when they were planting non-GMO seeds.
- the country's food supply becomes dependent on foreign countries/corporations, which can cause severe problems at international negotiating tables.
- the GMO crop has long term health impacts, say after 20 years of use. When these are discovered, it is no longer possible to go back to non-GMO because the infrastructure required for non-GMO crops is not easily reconstructable (for instance a country might reduce its pesticide production significantly once enough farmers have switched to GMO). Similarly, farmers have living knowledge about how to grow certain crop varieties learned by long experience. non-GMO and GMO varieties require different techniques, and non-GMO techniques may be forgotten, making it infeasible to switch back to non-GMO.
Decisions to prevent these outcomes can only occur at the government/regulatory level, and may possibly be "GMO are banned".
I don't think you can arbitrarily leave out all the other parties in the agricultural system: the bank, who the farmer may need to borrow from to buy seed, the politicians, who may or may not accept money from the companies producing GMO seeds to produce favourable legislation, the public, who may vote with their wallets when purchasing the resulting crops, and so on...
If your neighbor planted a GMO crop in their field, and then sprayed them with the compatible chemicals, two things might happen:
1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops
2. The seeds from the GMO crop spread into your field, and corporate hired goons show up at your door threatening you with a lawsuit. Or maybe if your neighbor doesn't like you, they spread some GMO seed in your field, then report you to the company.
This led to neighbor versus neighbor conflicts in ag communities, in some cases turning violent.
This (2) case is, I think, mostly (maybe entirely) false. In every case I've read where this was claimed, the actual fact pattern was that the "victim" farmer wound up with unlicensed herbicide/pesticide-resistant crops that they then sprayed with herbicide or pesticide. If you plant unlicensed Roundup-Ready seeds and then spray the crop with Roundup, you know what you were doing.
1 - farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an issue. the epa requires this in the us and they look at drift before approving spray
2 - this has only happened when someone sprays their crop thus killing anything that isn't gmo and bringing the patents into the field. if you don't take advantage of the trait the corporate people don't care.
though many of the more useful traits are off patent now and so they won't care anyway
We have a small-ish farm in Oregon. We religiously watch the wind before spraying for two reasons:
1) Chemicals are extremely expensive and chemicals that drift off the field are wasted, not to mention that in high winds you can't be confident in good coverage (unless you just dramatically increase your spray amount, which, see again re: cost).
2) Despite our extreme care, we have had regulatory bodies called on us by neighbours about drift (investigation exonerated us).
Thus we have both an internal, selfish reason to not spray during high wands and an external reason to not spray during high winds. I can't speak to other areas of the country (let alone the world) or other kinds of farming.
>1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops
That sounds like it should be handled by tort law rather than GMO laws. Even without GMOs you'll have issues like this, for instance conventional fields polluting organic fields, or herbicides that work for one type of plant but not another.
Valid points but this seems more simple to address using regulation rather than removing the seed patents (which are essential to some degree to make this whole process worthwhile for manufacturers). The argument is that without seed patents most of the genuine advancements would not be worth pursuing.
What regulation would you propose to fix either of these issues?
Case 2 I suspect could be addressed by a law granting some level of immunity for simply having GMO plants in a field. But how do you fix Case 1 with laws? These are effects of biology and physics.
If a factory pours poison into a farmers water source they can already sue, I cannot imagine it would be significantly harder to enable similar regulation for fertilizers and pesticides.
The legal costs would bankrupt most non-corporate farms. (In fact that's what happened - as explained in the link in that comment, many farmers had to settle even if they believed themselves innocent.)
A lawsuit is rarely a good remedy to a problem, between legal costs, the time delay to any rewards, and the overloaded court system strongly encouraging people to settle out of court.
Monsanto has already made legally binding declarations that they will never sue for "simply having GMO plants in a field" or "accidentally growing trace amounts of patented crops" which have been affirmatively held as legally binding [1].
The cases you are referencing are cases where the farmer discovers trace contamination of their field, then deliberately sprays Roundup to kill all non-GMO crops, then deliberately harvest seed from the survivors, then deliberately create a GMO section of their farm where they repeatedly plant and harvest to concentrate seed production until they have multiple thousands of acres of GMO crops they derived from the trace contamination [2].
Or cases where they signed a agreement to not replant their GMO soybeans, so they sold those GMO soybeans to a facility which sells to consumers for consumption, then turned around and rebought from that same facility the GMO soybeans they just sold so they could replant them [3] claiming that the sale to a third party meant they were not "replanting" the soybeans they just produced since they just oopsie-whoopsie bought them from someone not bound by the agreement.
If you actually look into it, most of the cases that people imagine were really bad or evidence of Monsanto screwing farmers are actually examples of ridiculously slimy farmers. That is not to say that Monsanto is a saint as they almost surely are hiding evidence of Roundup toxicity and you should be generally distrusting that large corporations are value-aligned with regular people, but specifically in the cases of Monsanto versus farmers, the farmers are almost always hiding how absolutely slimy they are actually being.
Why is that horrific? Is it because some farmers are smaller operations and have less bargaining power? What about a large farming conglomerate, e.g. Cargill? What in particular is bad about this contract, and makes it different from other contracts?
Is it horrific to be sued for modifying and selling software with a removed GPLv3 notice?
> 1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops
Have you ever been on a farm?
> 2. The seeds from the GMO crop spread into your field, and corporate hired goons show up at your door threatening you with a lawsuit.
Sorry, but this video is just pure post-truth bullshit. I unsubscribed from Veritassium because of this video, and I was a paying Patreon subscriber.
Monsanto has NEVER sued anyone for accidental contamination. Moreover, they will buy out your contaminated crops at higher-than-market prices.
They sued farmers that specifically and intentionally, over several years, bred resistant crops by using GMO genes from neighboring fields or by replanting the previous years' crop.
> This led to neighbor versus neighbor conflicts in ag communities, in some cases turning violent.
Can you cite any examples? Go on, fire up Kagi and search.
> I feel like this kind of discussion hinges on a misguided belief that farmers are not very smart businessmen.
I feel like assuming that the farmers are competent businessmen capable of understanding the ups and downs of GMOs is in disagreement with reality and mostly used to drive "free marketeering / deregulation" agendas.
The problem is that even with the seed rent-seeking, GMO crops are more productive and more profitable.
The farmer still makes just enough money, with some corporate middleman skimming off the top for no good reason. It's not that the fees are untenable- obviously nobody will buy it if they can't make a profit. The problem is the corporate rent-seeking. Producers have to raise costs which percolates up into increased costs for consumers.
Many businesses are not thinking long term. Farming businesses are businesses too, and may prefer short term profitability over long term sustainability.
See for example the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, which is at the same time an existential threat to to farming and caused by farming.
Imagine if hypothetically a supplier offered very competitive - maybe even loss-making - prices when they had 25% of the market; then once they had 90% of the market and most of their competitors had gone out of business, they planned to raise prices substantially, make back the loss, and produce a big profit.
Isn't each customer's decision to buy (or not buy) from the loss-making supplier a tragedy-of-the-commons situation?
I struggle for an example of that actually working. If it does it must be exceedingly rare. I can think of lots of example of having 25% of the market and then getting closer to the majority by cutting prices, but the part where they jack them back up usually doesn't work. For instance, Rockefeller did that to put his competition out of business, but then the price of Kerosene just kept going down.
The times where it actually worked (railroad) was because the people doing it convinced the government afterwards to "protect the market" (interstate commerce act) and created a violence enforced cartel that prohibited by law rebates and other methods by which cartels (and pre-ICA railroad cartels) commonly fall apart.
depends on which farmers youre talking about. In much of the world, they're smallholder subsistence farmers with little to no education, and are often at the mercy of middlemen who steal a significant proportion of their (meager, due to not much land that they dont really know how to take care of/take advantage of) crops' value.
That's a story of a farmer in debt because he had two consecutive years of crop failure. I'd be less apt to blame the expected cost of seeds than the unexpected crop failures for his misfortune.
Are they? Farmers in the US just went a full month without selling a single soy bean to China. The last time it happened was seven years ago. Guess who was president both times it happened. Guess who farmers overwhelmingly voted for? They regularly vote against their own business interests. Perhaps farmers in Nigeria are better educated.
I was also curious about this, so I ended up watching a documentary a local politician made where she interviewed local farmers trying to figure out why they would vote against their own best interests, and the short answer was, net, they thought additional bailouts + deregulation of farming would outweigh the potential trade war.
The entire reason almost every modern country massively subsidizes and manages the staple food crops of their agricultural economy is that letting them rationally act in their best interests kept causing famines when farmers did dumb things, like cause the dust bowl.
Central management of food supplies has been an essential part of societal stability since ancient times, and the USSR using "industrialization" and "centralization" of farming as an excuse to kill a bunch of "kulaks" does not undo that.
I’m fairly sure that farmers often buy seeds rather than harvesting them. There are lots of reasons for this but essentially growing seeds and growing produce is just quite different. I don’t think it’s the dramatic shift you’re making it out to be.
It depends on the crop. With cereals, the seed is the product, and you could divert a part of production to next year's planting. With other crops, harvest may happen before seeds mature and may require special processing to extract them for the seed producers.
If you are planting hybrid seeds you would never save seeds because their children don't yield well. Hybrid yields so much better that it isn't worth planting anything else if you have the option.
I think having terminator genes in seeds is a reasonable safeguard against leaking lots of novel genes into the environment above and beyond what crops from across the planet already would leak. I think this is a benefit that people too quickly dismiss. Seed saving as others have pointed out is already increasingly rare for many crops.
You do understand that your requirement effectively cuts out many modern non-GMO seeds?
One of the big advancements in the turn of the 20th century was heterosis, or the systematic exploitation of hybrid vigor. If you maintain two (or more) extremely inbred but different from each other germlines, but cross them to produce seed, you get seed that is much more heterozygotic than is naturally common. This seed is then dramatically more viable and productive. But if you replant what it yields, you only get very disappointing yield.
That is, it has been normal for farmers to buy new seed each season from some provider that specializes in making very productive seed for more than a hundred years now. Part of getting developing countries to raise their agricultural productivity to modern standards is getting them to start doing this, instead of continuously replanting their old seeds.
To this day nobody in the agritech industry touting expensive super seeds and synthetics has figured out how to sustainably sell their products to developing countries.
Agriculture is the primary industry in most developing nations. The value proposition of agritech is "give us your money and we'll give you food". Meanwhile the people in developed countries need a way to turn what they already produce into money. The objectives are diametrically opposed.
How exactly is an agricultural society that primarily produces crops to feed itself pay for the imported goods which were the source of their money in the past? What I'm trying to get at here is the fact that a domestic farmer has to export their crops to earn money for the imported inputs. You need more land to feed the same quantity of people, because only a portion of the land will be farmed for domestic consumption.
The business model just fundamentally doesn't make much sense, because it makes the underlying assumption that these people are already busy doing more important things than farming that earn them enough money to buy seeds, so buying the more productive seeds means they are less busy farming and spend more time earning money.
Apple trees are weird. You can take a seed from an apple tree in your yard and grow apples that taste disgusting. One of the apples from that disgusting tree might make apples that taste absolutely heavenly. You can't just grow an apple tree from seed and expect anything other than an apple only fit for making alcohol. Johnny Appleseed was keeping folks drunk, not healthy.
Hybrids sometimes produce no seeds or seeds that won't grow the same thing. Sometimes this is desirable - seedless watermelons, for example. Or having a plant that grows better in your region at the cost of having to buy seeds (which you were likely to do in modern times regardless).
I get your point, but this isn't really a problem that's special to GMOs in particular. It is a problem now, and it isn't always that horrible of one. We can support farmers better now and prevent some of it now.
From a practical standpoint that is difficult to do. E.g. many crops are hybrid species taking advantage of hybrid vigor (1). If the hybrid is fertile at all will be quite variable in phenotypes.
On the other hand fertile GMOs will sooner or later mix into the surrounding nature, compete with local plants and undergo "normal" evolution. This might be undesirable.
Another consideration is that optimizing one or two features like yield or resistance in plants often affects other areas negatively like adaptability or fertiliy. Making fertile GMOs with the same yield is probably harder than making infertile ones.
But at the very least it should not be possible to patent or copyright DNA or any other parts of living organisms, what an utterly horrible idea.
Is natural breeding better with just randomly flipping genes with help of radiation or whatever they use to get a bunch of genes to flip? At least with GMO, you know the outcomes of the DNA instead of rolling dice over and over.
GMO is just more precision and regular breeding can do the same given enough time. It’s just DNA code end of the day.
> I'm a believer in taking advantage of GM crops but also believe that some kind of regulation should be put in place to ensure that those crops yield seeds that can be used to plant future generations.
This hasn't been that useful for quite a while. Most modern crops are hybrids that rapidly degrade if they are just replanted year after year.
> but also believe that some kind of regulation should be put in place to ensure that those crops yield seeds that can be used to plant future generations.
Did you mistype? I think in general it should be 100% illegal with guaranteed jail time to to make any non sterile otherwise we are just going to create our own invasive species.
> In general, a higher democracy index correlates with greater GM acceptance, although large differences exist between individual nations.5 South America contains both pro-GM and GM-skeptical nations. When comparing the two using the Democracy Index, however, the pro-GM countries have a consistently higher Democracy Index (6.8) than those that ban GM (4.4). Similarly, the mean Democracy Index for Sub-Saharan African countries that cultivate or are currently legislating towards GM crop cultivation (4.7) is higher than those that ban it (3.5).
> This suggests that fostering democratic accountability is not simply a political good in itself, but also a precursor for enabling science-based agriculture. For countries looking to promote GM, the priority may not be exporting “democracy” wholesale, but supporting governments in building credibility, transparency, and public trust — the very conditions under which new technologies can take root.
This makes this piece sound like a political propaganda post. There is no concrete causal mechanism posited here, just vague assertions. Two seconds of thought would reveal that all non-democratic countries have adopted technologies of all sorts. And people in those countries use technologies extensively in daily life.
I would assume it is easier for corporations to spread bribes around in a decentralized decision making system like representative democracy, than it is in centralized authoritarian systems.
> I would assume it is easier for corporations to spread bribes around in a decentralized decision making system like representative democracy, than it is in centralized authoritarian systems.
I would assume the opposite. The more authoritarian the country, the fewer people who need to be bribed to get what you want, generally speaking (placing things like lobbying under the umbrella of bribes).
Is there not a confounding factor at play that a more functional government would facilitate both more democracy and more legislation on newer technology? Is this notion that "it might be nice to help your target market have a generally working government to facilitate them being willing to divert money towards non-corruption goals and able to protect your market with laws" really that new?
(Here the model would be that democracy is something that countries develop once they have some OK government systems, not that democracy in itself makes those systems better, but it works with the causation the other way too)
I agree: at first glance it is a very flimsy argument -- made by an organization whose entire purpose seems to be to advocate for what they consider to be technological progress specifically in the biological domain.
They've allowed for a huge expansion of the use of herbicide but drastically reduced the use of insecticide. I'd much rather have the former than the later.
Before you reply remember random mutation is common - normal in nature. what is the difference between a random mutation and one a scientist comes up with. So far the only one I've found is random mutation isn't studied for safety.
One common drawback of GM crops is the monopolistic nature of their seeds. They come with a license and a cost to use, you cannot save seeds and use them later. So it seems like a threat to the sovereignty of a Country.
The article briefly mentions that initially some seeds are given with royalty free licenses, but for how long?
Re 2: on this software engineering forum, the following example will help.
If you have core dependency goes rogue, and you have to switch to an alternate library with similar features, is that a free switch? Think of how many thousands of hours of work are often needed? How many businesses have gone under because of such issues?
Growing a particular variety requires a lot of knowledge gained by each individual farmer from experience. You can't just go back to an old variety for free. It may take several years for yields to go back to previous levels and by then the farmer may have gone under.
Farmers change seeds all the time. One I know tells me that a great variety will terrible in 3 more years, though I'm not clear why. In any case they all are planting several varities ever year - four different ones in a field isn't uncommon - with harvest data to track the difference (different soils need different seeds). Test plots where they do many different side by side are somewhat common. they are always trying different options to see what works to do more. Plus predictions on weather mean different seeds.
Ok but going back to the library analogy, GMO bans are like the government banning react.js because they're convinced angularjs (or jquery) is good enough and facebook might go rogue. Shouldn't it be up to individual farmers to decide?
Regardless of potential bribes to politicians, its easy to look at the increased yields from GMO foods as a benefit for a country where ~20% of the population are undernourished
It is an artificial dichotomy tbh. When you say GMO foods, you usually refer to foods that have been introduced to populations across the globe in environments they are not suitable to be grown in. Yes GMO rice will probably grow better and feed more people in drought prone regions of India, but so would the indigenous millets that were replaced by rice. They require less water (and fertilizers and pesticides that GMOs require), are more resilient to climate events and more suitable to local climate. Not saying GMO foods are A solution, just that they aren’t the ONLY solution if the goal was to feed enough people.
Behavior follows costs. There is probably some stumbling block regarding millets. That being said, seed companies are very interested in land races, do not be mistaken. They are a good source of phenotypic variation and potential traits that might be favorable to introduce into the elite cultivars.
Did you read the article? I think this case study shows why gm is likely to be key to avoiding mass starvation as climate change becomes a bigger issue.
I'm a believer in taking advantage of GM crops but also believe that some kind of regulation should be put in place to ensure that those crops yield seeds that can be used to plant future generations.
If these crops are designed to require you to buy from a producing company each year, that just seems so fundamentally artificial and going against the grain of all of our agricultural history. And I can see how much of a slippery slope it can represent... ayou read about farmer suicides in India related to this topic. I bring this up because the fact that none of this is discussed in the article makes me fear it's got a profit agenda.
Most farmers don't save seed for replanting anymore even if they're non GMO, especially if they want to be economically competitive. The $50-150/acre that seeds cost are a small fraction of the benefit of using F1 hybrid seeds due to hybrid vigor - the plants they produce have a higher yield that more than makes up for it, on the order of 15-50% higher depending on variety.
The seeds they get from a manufacturer also mature more consistently and uniformly, they do a much better job of cleaning and protecting the seed (e.g. fungicide), and usually end up costing less than doing it yourself because of the labor involved in preparing the seed for storage.
If it's economically advantageous to buy the seeds anyway then why do the manufacturers legally prohibit the farmers to save the seeds? Wouldn't the farmers naturally pick the option that yields them the most profit?
I feel like this kind of discussion hinges on a misguided belief that farmers are not very smart businessmen. The idea that a farmer would abandon their current crop for GMO crop that they cannot replant without making a cost-benefit analysis in their head just strikes me as very odd. These peoples life depend on making such decisions, we should trust them to make them themselves.
In a multi-agent dynamic system, the optimal actions by each individual agents (based on whatever cost-benefit analysis they do) can evolve the system into a state where every agent is worse off compared to some initial state. This holds even if every individual agent is a "smart businessperson".
One main purpose of law and social rules is to prevent multi-agent systems from getting stuck into these global non-optimal states. And arguing that agents are smart is not a counter-argument to this.
Great point.
As an extreme example, I'd add -- in some cases, because of market conditions (and perhaps the legal climate as well), within a given financial year a farmer may be forced to choose between purchasing GMO seeds and having to sell the farm, especially if the farm already used licensed GMO seeds in a prior year.
But as you pointed out, without legal and regulatory guardrails, the system at large can become badly suboptimal long before compromise-or-die dichotomies arise.
This is true in the abstract but I don’t see how it applies to this specific case. There are two agents here and the GMO plants will only be planted if planting them is the optimal choice for both.
If you are a farmer who has the choice of planting more productive plants or not, if you do not, you will be at a disadvantage and eventually will be outcompeted in the market if you don't "defect". Planting the GMO is the optimal choice if you want to survive in the short term, even if you can see disaster looming in the long term despite sweet supplier promises.
Once everyone is using the proprietary seeds, the price magically goes up and the farmers have less money than they had before, but the biotech company now gets a cut of every grain of wheat which has to increase year on year (growth!). This isn't the only negative outcome you could imagine.
A classic multipolar trap for the farmers because they all made an entirely rational decision at every stage and yet they all ended up worse off in the end. And a trap agrotech will be extremely happy to coax farmers into.
For their part, if they don't do it, a less scrupulous company would and so they need to do it or get outcompeted - not only must they grow, they just grow faster than the competition to survive long term. And so they are also a trap of their own where they could end up in a strongly negative situation (angry mobs after their blood, say) despite making what was both an optimal and necessary decision at every step.
Which is not to say you can't or even shouldn't use biotech to increase crop yield. It's just that you can't rely on people making rational choices for themselves to produce long-term overall good outcomes.
The agents are numerous, as pointed out by sibling comment.
The farmer agents only make decisions based on personal profitability. The overall system after some years can evolve to a state where some of the following are true:
- the GMO seed maker acquires a monopoly over certain types of seeds, which enables it to reduce farmer profits to below what they were when they were planting non-GMO seeds.
- the country's food supply becomes dependent on foreign countries/corporations, which can cause severe problems at international negotiating tables.
- the GMO crop has long term health impacts, say after 20 years of use. When these are discovered, it is no longer possible to go back to non-GMO because the infrastructure required for non-GMO crops is not easily reconstructable (for instance a country might reduce its pesticide production significantly once enough farmers have switched to GMO). Similarly, farmers have living knowledge about how to grow certain crop varieties learned by long experience. non-GMO and GMO varieties require different techniques, and non-GMO techniques may be forgotten, making it infeasible to switch back to non-GMO.
Decisions to prevent these outcomes can only occur at the government/regulatory level, and may possibly be "GMO are banned".
I don't think you can arbitrarily leave out all the other parties in the agricultural system: the bank, who the farmer may need to borrow from to buy seed, the politicians, who may or may not accept money from the companies producing GMO seeds to produce favourable legislation, the public, who may vote with their wallets when purchasing the resulting crops, and so on...
Moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
If your neighbor planted a GMO crop in their field, and then sprayed them with the compatible chemicals, two things might happen:
1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops
2. The seeds from the GMO crop spread into your field, and corporate hired goons show up at your door threatening you with a lawsuit. Or maybe if your neighbor doesn't like you, they spread some GMO seed in your field, then report you to the company.
This led to neighbor versus neighbor conflicts in ag communities, in some cases turning violent.
https://youtu.be/CxVXvFOPIyQ?t=1567
This (2) case is, I think, mostly (maybe entirely) false. In every case I've read where this was claimed, the actual fact pattern was that the "victim" farmer wound up with unlicensed herbicide/pesticide-resistant crops that they then sprayed with herbicide or pesticide. If you plant unlicensed Roundup-Ready seeds and then spray the crop with Roundup, you know what you were doing.
1 - farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an issue. the epa requires this in the us and they look at drift before approving spray
2 - this has only happened when someone sprays their crop thus killing anything that isn't gmo and bringing the patents into the field. if you don't take advantage of the trait the corporate people don't care.
though many of the more useful traits are off patent now and so they won't care anyway
> farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an issue
Do they really? Never seem my neighbours being particularly picky about wind conditions.
> the epa requires this in the us and they look at drift before approving spray
Putting aside the current grave gutting of the agency in question, do they really inspect each usage on a regular basis or is it a pinky promise?
> this has only happened when someone sprays their crop thus killing anything that isn't gmo
That's a primary problem which is already happening as linked previously in the discussion, it essentially forces a mono-supplier and a mono-culture.
We have a small-ish farm in Oregon. We religiously watch the wind before spraying for two reasons:
1) Chemicals are extremely expensive and chemicals that drift off the field are wasted, not to mention that in high winds you can't be confident in good coverage (unless you just dramatically increase your spray amount, which, see again re: cost). 2) Despite our extreme care, we have had regulatory bodies called on us by neighbours about drift (investigation exonerated us).
Thus we have both an internal, selfish reason to not spray during high wands and an external reason to not spray during high winds. I can't speak to other areas of the country (let alone the world) or other kinds of farming.
It doesn't force a mono-supplier, since existing seeds are not suddenly made unavailable when new seeds are brought to market.
>1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops
That sounds like it should be handled by tort law rather than GMO laws. Even without GMOs you'll have issues like this, for instance conventional fields polluting organic fields, or herbicides that work for one type of plant but not another.
Valid points but this seems more simple to address using regulation rather than removing the seed patents (which are essential to some degree to make this whole process worthwhile for manufacturers). The argument is that without seed patents most of the genuine advancements would not be worth pursuing.
What regulation would you propose to fix either of these issues?
Case 2 I suspect could be addressed by a law granting some level of immunity for simply having GMO plants in a field. But how do you fix Case 1 with laws? These are effects of biology and physics.
If a factory pours poison into a farmers water source they can already sue, I cannot imagine it would be significantly harder to enable similar regulation for fertilizers and pesticides.
Yes, that very famously worked for PFAS poisoned waters by DuPont in the US.
It's still ongoing and we're 24 years later.
The legal costs would bankrupt most non-corporate farms. (In fact that's what happened - as explained in the link in that comment, many farmers had to settle even if they believed themselves innocent.)
A lawsuit is rarely a good remedy to a problem, between legal costs, the time delay to any rewards, and the overloaded court system strongly encouraging people to settle out of court.
Monsanto has already made legally binding declarations that they will never sue for "simply having GMO plants in a field" or "accidentally growing trace amounts of patented crops" which have been affirmatively held as legally binding [1].
The cases you are referencing are cases where the farmer discovers trace contamination of their field, then deliberately sprays Roundup to kill all non-GMO crops, then deliberately harvest seed from the survivors, then deliberately create a GMO section of their farm where they repeatedly plant and harvest to concentrate seed production until they have multiple thousands of acres of GMO crops they derived from the trace contamination [2].
Or cases where they signed a agreement to not replant their GMO soybeans, so they sold those GMO soybeans to a facility which sells to consumers for consumption, then turned around and rebought from that same facility the GMO soybeans they just sold so they could replant them [3] claiming that the sale to a third party meant they were not "replanting" the soybeans they just produced since they just oopsie-whoopsie bought them from someone not bound by the agreement.
If you actually look into it, most of the cases that people imagine were really bad or evidence of Monsanto screwing farmers are actually examples of ridiculously slimy farmers. That is not to say that Monsanto is a saint as they almost surely are hiding evidence of Roundup toxicity and you should be generally distrusting that large corporations are value-aligned with regular people, but specifically in the cases of Monsanto versus farmers, the farmers are almost always hiding how absolutely slimy they are actually being.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/06/12/190977225/co...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.
The idea that a farmer can ever be sued for saving seeds is horrific, no matter what corporate pr speak you dress it up in
Why is that horrific? Is it because some farmers are smaller operations and have less bargaining power? What about a large farming conglomerate, e.g. Cargill? What in particular is bad about this contract, and makes it different from other contracts?
Is it horrific to be sued for modifying and selling software with a removed GPLv3 notice?
this is still based on the idea that farmers are bad businessmen, and couldnt find the seed innovation because it would result in better crops.
if the advancement is genuinely worthwhile, farmers are going to make it happen
The whole point of the G in GMO is that you don’t get these plants by the usual technique of selecting good strains produced by natural gene variance.
Point 1 isn't a "might happen", it's a "will happen"
> 1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop field, killing your non-GMO crops
Have you ever been on a farm?
> 2. The seeds from the GMO crop spread into your field, and corporate hired goons show up at your door threatening you with a lawsuit.
Sorry, but this video is just pure post-truth bullshit. I unsubscribed from Veritassium because of this video, and I was a paying Patreon subscriber.
Monsanto has NEVER sued anyone for accidental contamination. Moreover, they will buy out your contaminated crops at higher-than-market prices.
They sued farmers that specifically and intentionally, over several years, bred resistant crops by using GMO genes from neighboring fields or by replanting the previous years' crop.
> This led to neighbor versus neighbor conflicts in ag communities, in some cases turning violent.
Can you cite any examples? Go on, fire up Kagi and search.
Monsanto Derangement Syndrome got Veritasium? Geez...
> I feel like this kind of discussion hinges on a misguided belief that farmers are not very smart businessmen.
I feel like assuming that the farmers are competent businessmen capable of understanding the ups and downs of GMOs is in disagreement with reality and mostly used to drive "free marketeering / deregulation" agendas.
The problem is that even with the seed rent-seeking, GMO crops are more productive and more profitable.
The farmer still makes just enough money, with some corporate middleman skimming off the top for no good reason. It's not that the fees are untenable- obviously nobody will buy it if they can't make a profit. The problem is the corporate rent-seeking. Producers have to raise costs which percolates up into increased costs for consumers.
How are the food costs raising if GMO crops are more productive? Shouldn't this increase supply and lower prices?
What would stop them from jacking up prices when they have monopoly? It's not like we haven't seen this scenario before..
Many businesses are not thinking long term. Farming businesses are businesses too, and may prefer short term profitability over long term sustainability.
See for example the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer, which is at the same time an existential threat to to farming and caused by farming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
This is a tragedy of the commons and not comparable to a singular farmer making a singular decision about what to plant on his field.
Imagine if hypothetically a supplier offered very competitive - maybe even loss-making - prices when they had 25% of the market; then once they had 90% of the market and most of their competitors had gone out of business, they planned to raise prices substantially, make back the loss, and produce a big profit.
Isn't each customer's decision to buy (or not buy) from the loss-making supplier a tragedy-of-the-commons situation?
I struggle for an example of that actually working. If it does it must be exceedingly rare. I can think of lots of example of having 25% of the market and then getting closer to the majority by cutting prices, but the part where they jack them back up usually doesn't work. For instance, Rockefeller did that to put his competition out of business, but then the price of Kerosene just kept going down.
The times where it actually worked (railroad) was because the people doing it convinced the government afterwards to "protect the market" (interstate commerce act) and created a violence enforced cartel that prohibited by law rebates and other methods by which cartels (and pre-ICA railroad cartels) commonly fall apart.
Once mosanto has 90% of the market and they jack up their prices. Farmers can go back to growing non-GMO seeds and not using round up to weed.
Imagine if Monsanto just murdered every farmer that didn't use their seeds.
Both are equally legal.
depends on which farmers youre talking about. In much of the world, they're smallholder subsistence farmers with little to no education, and are often at the mercy of middlemen who steal a significant proportion of their (meager, due to not much land that they dont really know how to take care of/take advantage of) crops' value.
I can’t think of a more complete “Jack of all trades” than the modern farmer.
Many Indian farmers have been driven to suicide due to debt from buying GMO seeds https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1082559/The-GM-geno...
That's a story of a farmer in debt because he had two consecutive years of crop failure. I'd be less apt to blame the expected cost of seeds than the unexpected crop failures for his misfortune.
It's not just a question of intelligence or education, but also power.
The free market does not always produce good outcomes, hence the need for regulation.
Are they? Farmers in the US just went a full month without selling a single soy bean to China. The last time it happened was seven years ago. Guess who was president both times it happened. Guess who farmers overwhelmingly voted for? They regularly vote against their own business interests. Perhaps farmers in Nigeria are better educated.
I think farmers know about the trade war that Trump will create, but they also think he will do other things to help them.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/10/02/tru...
I was also curious about this, so I ended up watching a documentary a local politician made where she interviewed local farmers trying to figure out why they would vote against their own best interests, and the short answer was, net, they thought additional bailouts + deregulation of farming would outweigh the potential trade war.
They do not.
The entire reason almost every modern country massively subsidizes and manages the staple food crops of their agricultural economy is that letting them rationally act in their best interests kept causing famines when farmers did dumb things, like cause the dust bowl.
Central management of food supplies has been an essential part of societal stability since ancient times, and the USSR using "industrialization" and "centralization" of farming as an excuse to kill a bunch of "kulaks" does not undo that.
"going against the grain" --- was that deliberate? ;-)
I’m fairly sure that farmers often buy seeds rather than harvesting them. There are lots of reasons for this but essentially growing seeds and growing produce is just quite different. I don’t think it’s the dramatic shift you’re making it out to be.
It depends on the crop. With cereals, the seed is the product, and you could divert a part of production to next year's planting. With other crops, harvest may happen before seeds mature and may require special processing to extract them for the seed producers.
If you are planting hybrid seeds you would never save seeds because their children don't yield well. Hybrid yields so much better that it isn't worth planting anything else if you have the option.
I think having terminator genes in seeds is a reasonable safeguard against leaking lots of novel genes into the environment above and beyond what crops from across the planet already would leak. I think this is a benefit that people too quickly dismiss. Seed saving as others have pointed out is already increasingly rare for many crops.
You do understand that your requirement effectively cuts out many modern non-GMO seeds?
One of the big advancements in the turn of the 20th century was heterosis, or the systematic exploitation of hybrid vigor. If you maintain two (or more) extremely inbred but different from each other germlines, but cross them to produce seed, you get seed that is much more heterozygotic than is naturally common. This seed is then dramatically more viable and productive. But if you replant what it yields, you only get very disappointing yield.
That is, it has been normal for farmers to buy new seed each season from some provider that specializes in making very productive seed for more than a hundred years now. Part of getting developing countries to raise their agricultural productivity to modern standards is getting them to start doing this, instead of continuously replanting their old seeds.
Thanks for this. I did not know
To this day nobody in the agritech industry touting expensive super seeds and synthetics has figured out how to sustainably sell their products to developing countries.
Agriculture is the primary industry in most developing nations. The value proposition of agritech is "give us your money and we'll give you food". Meanwhile the people in developed countries need a way to turn what they already produce into money. The objectives are diametrically opposed.
How exactly is an agricultural society that primarily produces crops to feed itself pay for the imported goods which were the source of their money in the past? What I'm trying to get at here is the fact that a domestic farmer has to export their crops to earn money for the imported inputs. You need more land to feed the same quantity of people, because only a portion of the land will be farmed for domestic consumption.
The business model just fundamentally doesn't make much sense, because it makes the underlying assumption that these people are already busy doing more important things than farming that earn them enough money to buy seeds, so buying the more productive seeds means they are less busy farming and spend more time earning money.
I really dislike this logic because it centers the farmers, not the people who buy agricultural products (everybody).
Apple trees are weird. You can take a seed from an apple tree in your yard and grow apples that taste disgusting. One of the apples from that disgusting tree might make apples that taste absolutely heavenly. You can't just grow an apple tree from seed and expect anything other than an apple only fit for making alcohol. Johnny Appleseed was keeping folks drunk, not healthy.
Hybrids sometimes produce no seeds or seeds that won't grow the same thing. Sometimes this is desirable - seedless watermelons, for example. Or having a plant that grows better in your region at the cost of having to buy seeds (which you were likely to do in modern times regardless).
I get your point, but this isn't really a problem that's special to GMOs in particular. It is a problem now, and it isn't always that horrible of one. We can support farmers better now and prevent some of it now.
From a practical standpoint that is difficult to do. E.g. many crops are hybrid species taking advantage of hybrid vigor (1). If the hybrid is fertile at all will be quite variable in phenotypes.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis
On the other hand fertile GMOs will sooner or later mix into the surrounding nature, compete with local plants and undergo "normal" evolution. This might be undesirable.
Another consideration is that optimizing one or two features like yield or resistance in plants often affects other areas negatively like adaptability or fertiliy. Making fertile GMOs with the same yield is probably harder than making infertile ones.
But at the very least it should not be possible to patent or copyright DNA or any other parts of living organisms, what an utterly horrible idea.
Is natural breeding better with just randomly flipping genes with help of radiation or whatever they use to get a bunch of genes to flip? At least with GMO, you know the outcomes of the DNA instead of rolling dice over and over.
GMO is just more precision and regular breeding can do the same given enough time. It’s just DNA code end of the day.
> I'm a believer in taking advantage of GM crops but also believe that some kind of regulation should be put in place to ensure that those crops yield seeds that can be used to plant future generations.
This hasn't been that useful for quite a while. Most modern crops are hybrids that rapidly degrade if they are just replanted year after year.
> but also believe that some kind of regulation should be put in place to ensure that those crops yield seeds that can be used to plant future generations.
Did you mistype? I think in general it should be 100% illegal with guaranteed jail time to to make any non sterile otherwise we are just going to create our own invasive species.
Farmers want sterile crops. last years seed in this years field is a weed that messes with your crop rotation plan without any upsides.
From the TFA
> In general, a higher democracy index correlates with greater GM acceptance, although large differences exist between individual nations.5 South America contains both pro-GM and GM-skeptical nations. When comparing the two using the Democracy Index, however, the pro-GM countries have a consistently higher Democracy Index (6.8) than those that ban GM (4.4). Similarly, the mean Democracy Index for Sub-Saharan African countries that cultivate or are currently legislating towards GM crop cultivation (4.7) is higher than those that ban it (3.5).
> This suggests that fostering democratic accountability is not simply a political good in itself, but also a precursor for enabling science-based agriculture. For countries looking to promote GM, the priority may not be exporting “democracy” wholesale, but supporting governments in building credibility, transparency, and public trust — the very conditions under which new technologies can take root.
This makes this piece sound like a political propaganda post. There is no concrete causal mechanism posited here, just vague assertions. Two seconds of thought would reveal that all non-democratic countries have adopted technologies of all sorts. And people in those countries use technologies extensively in daily life.
I would assume it is easier for corporations to spread bribes around in a decentralized decision making system like representative democracy, than it is in centralized authoritarian systems.
> I would assume it is easier for corporations to spread bribes around in a decentralized decision making system like representative democracy, than it is in centralized authoritarian systems.
I would assume the opposite. The more authoritarian the country, the fewer people who need to be bribed to get what you want, generally speaking (placing things like lobbying under the umbrella of bribes).
Is there not a confounding factor at play that a more functional government would facilitate both more democracy and more legislation on newer technology? Is this notion that "it might be nice to help your target market have a generally working government to facilitate them being willing to divert money towards non-corruption goals and able to protect your market with laws" really that new?
(Here the model would be that democracy is something that countries develop once they have some OK government systems, not that democracy in itself makes those systems better, but it works with the causation the other way too)
I agree: at first glance it is a very flimsy argument -- made by an organization whose entire purpose seems to be to advocate for what they consider to be technological progress specifically in the biological domain.
GMOs allowed for the huge expansion on the use of pesticides in America, since the crops are "pesticide ready".
They've allowed for a huge expansion of the use of herbicide but drastically reduced the use of insecticide. I'd much rather have the former than the later.
What do you think farmers were doing before GM crops?
The real question is why anyone would not.
Before you reply remember random mutation is common - normal in nature. what is the difference between a random mutation and one a scientist comes up with. So far the only one I've found is random mutation isn't studied for safety.
One common drawback of GM crops is the monopolistic nature of their seeds. They come with a license and a cost to use, you cannot save seeds and use them later. So it seems like a threat to the sovereignty of a Country.
The article briefly mentions that initially some seeds are given with royalty free licenses, but for how long?
1. as others have mentioned in a sibling thread, "saving seeds" isn't really a thing that can be done with modern crops, GMO or not.
2. If you get a productivity boost from GMO, and but then GMO company goes rogue, can't you still go back to planting regular seeds?
Re 2: on this software engineering forum, the following example will help.
If you have core dependency goes rogue, and you have to switch to an alternate library with similar features, is that a free switch? Think of how many thousands of hours of work are often needed? How many businesses have gone under because of such issues?
Growing a particular variety requires a lot of knowledge gained by each individual farmer from experience. You can't just go back to an old variety for free. It may take several years for yields to go back to previous levels and by then the farmer may have gone under.
Farmers change seeds all the time. One I know tells me that a great variety will terrible in 3 more years, though I'm not clear why. In any case they all are planting several varities ever year - four different ones in a field isn't uncommon - with harvest data to track the difference (different soils need different seeds). Test plots where they do many different side by side are somewhat common. they are always trying different options to see what works to do more. Plus predictions on weather mean different seeds.
Ok but going back to the library analogy, GMO bans are like the government banning react.js because they're convinced angularjs (or jquery) is good enough and facebook might go rogue. Shouldn't it be up to individual farmers to decide?
The patents are expiring. Many of the useful traits are no longer under patent.
even ignoring that things the patents were easy for golden rice to license. https://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how9_IP.php
And before GMO essentially all modern strains were created by accelerating the mutation of plants via the application of x-rays.
Because they are poor and you can easily bribe the politicians
Regardless of potential bribes to politicians, its easy to look at the increased yields from GMO foods as a benefit for a country where ~20% of the population are undernourished
https://www.globalhungerindex.org/nigeria.html
You're making the fallacy that these people can afford greater quantities of more expensive food.
It is an artificial dichotomy tbh. When you say GMO foods, you usually refer to foods that have been introduced to populations across the globe in environments they are not suitable to be grown in. Yes GMO rice will probably grow better and feed more people in drought prone regions of India, but so would the indigenous millets that were replaced by rice. They require less water (and fertilizers and pesticides that GMOs require), are more resilient to climate events and more suitable to local climate. Not saying GMO foods are A solution, just that they aren’t the ONLY solution if the goal was to feed enough people.
Some additional reading: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10695985/#:~:text=A...
Behavior follows costs. There is probably some stumbling block regarding millets. That being said, seed companies are very interested in land races, do not be mistaken. They are a good source of phenotypic variation and potential traits that might be favorable to introduce into the elite cultivars.
Did you read the article? I think this case study shows why gm is likely to be key to avoiding mass starvation as climate change becomes a bigger issue.
The government can't even make a dent into wars between farmers and livestock herders.
Any political control or statement on GMOs are largely theater. They have next to no means to prohibit it nor subsidize it.
maybe we need to ask why was Nigeria in a place to accept GMOs being pushed by the Gates Foundation ?
what are the conditions that led to that outcome ?
Because GMOs are superior