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.
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.
I think that's the piece I and others are missing, isn't it ultimately a question of which seeds will make the farmer the most money? If a particular GMO seed suddenly become so expensive that either non-GMO or other GMO seeds are more cost-effective, why can't they just start using them instead?
Let's say GMO crops gives you a grain yield of 1-ton/acre and that non-GMO crops gives you a yield of 0.5-ton/acre. Now the market price is say set at $100/ton. This cuts down their earnings by half in the best case, all other inputs remaining the same.
Now if the GMO-seeds are controlled by a foreign entity, your entire agri output becomes dependent on that foreign entity not behaving badly. Whichever nation that controls the entity who owns the GMO-seed now has leverage over you.
So no, it isn't as simple as "switch back to using non-GMO seeds". This has to be carefully considered before adopting GMO-seeds.
How does that make any sense? They can always switch back to the non-GMO crops. Short of original seed somehow disappearing.. it seems the farmer can make the decision to switch back at any time. The GMO company has no mote to coerce people to keep using their product. They only use it as long as it provides higher profits.
You'd have to get very create to imagine scenarios where this breaks down. Like the local climate changes and the original seed is no longer viable, and they have a ton of agricultural equipment for this one particular crop type.
This also has the premise that the farmers are somehow stupid and don't realize seed prices can change year to year
More productive crops = more competitive = higher chance of market survival.
It's not about the crops per se. It's about surviving in a market that is ruthlessly cruel to anybody who doesn't subscribe to "line go up" dogma, and who isn't cutthroat in every advantage they can eke out or margin they can widen.
if the seed price is increased then either it will become feasible again, or the price of the crop will increase
but this is just extremely basic capitalist market forces... has no relation to GMO. The end result is cheaper food for everyone
I'm not a large-scale farmer, but I've spent more than my share of hours in the cab of a tractor. It's already very difficult to find seeds for "heritage varieties" of many crops.
For example - for the past several years, I've grown a small patch of "Little Dutch". It's a tobacco variety that was popular in the 19th Century, but fell out of favor. To my knowledge it is not currently grown commercially at all. The only reason there are seeds available is because someone collected it from a farm in Ohio at some point.
In this example, seeds can be ordered without too much hassle... but there are relatively few vendors selling them, and I'd say it's still at moderate risk of being lost. There's a small but active hobby community around growing esoteric tobacco varieties, but that's not the case for most food crops. I wouldn't even know where to begin to even determine what varieties were grown in my area fifty years ago, much less where to obtain seeds.
In fact, this conversation has prompted me to go acquire some sorghum from someone I know that has been planting a couple of acres and processing it themselves for at least the past 50 years. They're getting older, their kids aren't interested in agriculture, and I seriously doubt they could even tell me what variety they're growing. It wouldn't surprise me if they've not purchased seed in generations. When they pass, that line will likely be gone forever if someone doesn't intentionally preserve it.
Yet most of the world relies on such a system and it’s produced the highest advancement of any system.
The tale you weaved is clearly an edge case of a monopoly. That’s not the situation we have.
And you’re ignoring the fact that farmers will be aware that they are purchasing from a monopoly and that can help weight their decision.
Nah this is a simplification at best. Countries have regulation and laws, none rely only on free markets. GMO is great but it needs governance
All these arguments smack of badly functioning rationalizations for basically irrational prejudice against GMOs.
It also includes vigilance against such things as agricultural equipment with expensive repair lockouts, antibiotic overuse, soil degradation, deforestation and poor disease control.
The original assertion was that rational self-interested agents would naturally find and migrate to optimum global outcomes for everyone. Not only is this not true in the abstract game theoretic sense, but it's especially not true when many of the agents are independent developing world smallholders and some are multibillion agritech transnationals.
Obviously the argument is using GMO as the subject due to the context of the article, but you can have the exact same argument about powerful companies angling for capture of slices of many industries and even parts of the general human experience in many places where you can say "well if it wasn't going to be good for the farmers/taxi drivers/warehouse workers/software engineers/people looking for a date/restaurant chefs/whoever, they're not stupid and wouldn't agree to it".
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".
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.
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
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.
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.
So, no, you don't have any real argument here. It's all the usual rationalization of irrational GMO hatred.
Do you have any other wisdom to spare from below the bridge?
You really think they don't consider how to effectively apply the expensive chemicals that increase their profits by a ton?
... or you're trying to exterminate an errant plant, only to end up with it being the only thing remaining in the field.
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.
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.
It's still ongoing and we're 24 years later.
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.
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...
Is it horrific to be sued for modifying and selling software with a removed GPLv3 notice?
if the advancement is genuinely worthwhile, farmers are going to make it happen
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 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.
Never mind that the the exact same kind of people are simultaneous lobbying for the elimination of (quote) "unjustified trade restrictions or commercial requirements, such as labeling, that affect new technologies, including biotechnology" (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/19/4201)
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.
Isn't each customer's decision to buy (or not buy) from the loss-making supplier a tragedy-of-the-commons situation?
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.
There's nothing preventing a country from just ignoring patents, too. That pretty much happened in India with Bt cotton, engineered to express an insecticidal protein. Gray market seeds with the trait became widely available there and the foreign patent holders judged it not worthwhile to try to prosecute. This was all very good news for Indian cotton farmers, especially considering the personal cost to them of exposure to the pesticides they'd otherwise have to have used.
Both are equally legal.
The free market does not always produce good outcomes, hence the need for regulation.
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.
The farmer cries we've been hearing in the news over the last few months may be a little overblown, but they certainly aren't coming from a place where food costs are rising...
> Shouldn't this increase supply and lower prices?
Not necessarily. Prices are determined by supply _and demand_.
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.
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.
And honestly? They probably will. ICE basically stopped enforcing around here because the farmers threw a hissy fit.
The contradicting studies were mostly produced by "International Food Policy Research Institute, an agriculture policy think tank formed to promote the adoption of innovations in agricultural technology, based in Washington, D.C." which seems like an obvious conflict of interest.
People seem very focused on the science to the expense of the business side.
Like it's possible to be pro-database but anti-Oracle. And if the Oracle guys called you anti-database it would be very transparent bullshit. Doubly so if they wrapped it in "databases are going to save the poor" rhetoric.