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What prevents a farmer from simply switching back to the non-GMO seeds if the GMO option goes up in price? Or even ignoring that, switching to a different cheaper GMO seed from a different company?

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?

Not really - if the market price for a crop is such that it depends on the greater volume which can be produced by GMO seeds, switching to non-GMO seeds becomes uneconomic.

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.

> 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.

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

>> 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".

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.

i dont understand what the dogma is... yes, it may become economically infeasable to grow nonGMO plants. What's the problem?

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

My immediate concern is the loss of overall biodiversity and specific genetic lines.

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.

It's just that you can't rely on people making rational choices for themselves to produce long-term overall good outcomes.

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.

> Yet most of the world relies on such a system and it’s produced the highest advancement of any system.

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

Why does GMO need governance, vs. (say) hybrid non-GMO seeds?

All these arguments smack of badly functioning rationalizations for basically irrational prejudice against GMOs.

Food security in general does need governance and this does includes vulnerability to price fixing of non-GMO seeds and agricultural chemicals as well as safety.

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.

So it has nothing to do with GMOs specifically.

Correct. It's continuing the general observation first made here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725408) that doesn't specifically mention GMO at all and a disagreement with the premise of the reply to that here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45725551).

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".