> given that we waste ~40% of all food produced

That's a non-sequitur, and you're adding the loss stats in with waste.

> And that discounts any Black Swans lying in wait from transgenic organisms; we may still yet have a disaster...

Once it's a black swan, it's already discounted, the term itself means the thing is unlikely.

I think the subject deserves more study, but we have people dying of hunger right now, and that's plainly more compelling than "something really bad might happen, we have no idea what, why or how likely it is."

I think you should read Taleb's followup Antifragile sometime. The point is not that black swans are unlikely, but that they are catastrophic, and we can't even quantify how unlikely they are, so we have to find ways to prepare for them without basing it on probability estimates.

That "something really bad" might be localized ecological collapse, which I find pretty compelling, too.

Exactly. Possibly getting cancer when you are 70-80 would be a minor price to pay to not be guaranteed to starve to death when you are 5.

This is especially true if they only need a few years of GMOs to break bad cycles with conventional agriculture (such as eating next years seeds because they have no food now).

A black swan would be less on the scale of "higher long-term risk of cancer", and more like "unintended side effect wiped out pollinators and now the local agriculture is imperiled".

That is not "plainly more compelling." There is no undo button for GMOs -- once they are out in the wild there's no eradicating them.

For well over half a century we have understood that most famines are a result of entitlement failures, not lack of food availability.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theories_of_famines#Failure_of...

> given that we waste ~40% of all food produced

If you can come up with a technology or logistical process to make a significant change to that without causing famine, you've got a company with billions in revenue.

While I understand your logic, I don't think you can make this claim universally. Our food distribution systems are set up to be efficient, but they are also set up to be beneficial for a very small number of players.

For example there are very few distributors for grain: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-big-five...

The systems we have in place are meant to protect that near monopoly as much as they are to distribute food. On top of that, countries give loans to poor countries in exchange for 2 promises: 1) that they use the money to buy grain from the country lending the money 2) they don't grow grain themselves. In that way, we actively undermine world agriculture.

If your massive improvement disrupts these players, I think you're going to be in for a very rough time of it. Things like GMO further solidify the near monopolies, by restricting where you can buy seed, etc. This is one of the reasons you see a big political push for them.

Hmmm... I'd be interested to know more about this. Its going to be fairly hard to fight this I suppose. The US does have a powerful military interest* to be doing this, but I've not read about them actually doing so.

* To understand why, watch the movie Grave of the Fireflies. Or watch Indy Neidel on youtube talk about the "turnip winter"