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".