This is an interesting point. The practice of using GMOs, including the broad category of selective breeding, could ultimately lead to much less biodiversity which is, at best, not fully understood by us, but seems to be quite bad for life.
Unfortunately I am not optimistic that this is an inevitable outcome, at least not in the short-to-medium term; if you look at the software ecosystem or even just corporate structure in general, you see a strong pressure towards consolidation and monoculture rather than an emphasis on robustness to systemic risks.
However I think it's encouraging that advances in GM technology provide us with a potential long-term solution to the problem of monoculture, without asking us to give up the benefits that the market selected for in our current state. Of course we could solve monoculture in our current system by giving up the cultivars that the market prefers, and instead switching to more-localized and less-productive cultivars, but this doesn't seem like a realistic way of feeding 7-8B people.
Can you name a single commercially available GMO that has this property, aside from being a hybrid (hybrids don't breed true, but that's because they're hybrids, not because they're GMOs)? It is my understanding that there's no real need for any such technology anyway, as legal protection suffices.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/dupont-to-pick-up-wher... suggests that roundup-ready soy seeds are viable. So perhaps they rely solely on IP for protection.
I'm sincerely curious why this seems so far fetched to you. If I were the CEO of a company having the option to nudge my researchers into this, I probably would, seen from a ethics-detached point of view.
By the way, I'm not anti-GMO; in fact I think it's the only way to sustain the whole of humanity until we've passed the next great filter. Still I don't buy into that line of thought.
Not the person you're responding to, but there are three main responses I can give:
1. By and large, for most of the food crops that we eat, what we are eating is itself the seed of the crop. Tinkering with the reproductive elements of the crop has a higher chance of screwing up desirable properties of the food part of the crop than, say, introducing resistance to glyphosate.
2. In a related topic, genetic engineering is rarely so competent as being able to do something like "prevent reproduction." Seeing genetic manipulation as being basically like designer babies is pure science fiction; the more complex the demand is, the further in the realm of speculative nonsense it is.
3. On a related topic, there's the impact it has on the production costs of seedcorn. The easiest (cheapest) way to make anything biological is to use natural biology to make it, not try to create it in vitro. If I'm designing seeds, I'd rather make a couple of seeds using the expensive in vitro steps, plant them in a plot for a few generations, and sell their offspring, instead of trying to sell all the seed designing it in vitro. Inhibiting natural reproduction inhibits this method of making the product.
So, the scenario you seem to be thinking of is that GMOs will drive down the price of agricultural commodities, so that farmers who don't avail themselves of them will be unable to compete. But this argument "proves too much": it's an argument not against GMOs, but against ANY agricultural technology that boosts yields and reduces costs. Presumably the Green Revolution is not something we should object to because food prices declined.
I think you are on to something in understanding the anti-GMO motivation in Europe, though. Farmers don't want to have to compete against the more efficient large scale farmers in the US. Anti-GMOism is a kind of camouflaged protectionism.
Not saying that's the concern just my impression.
Your argument there does apply to non-Mendelian inheritance ("gene drive"), so banning modifications to crops that would be engineered to cause that seems prudent (although I'm not sure why anyone would want to do that). Modifications to pests, on the other hand...
I’m all for free markets for most markets, but things get very bad if people don’t have food. So I think there is a good case for the government funding research and open-sourcing the work here, and also potentially restricting eligibility of patents in this area too.
I think your argument is sound in a free-market maximalist / small-government libertarian framework, I’m just less convinced that the current IP framework produces good results in this case.
It would be problematic if that's the case. That is not the case however. What you're probably thinking of is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_Schmeise..., where the farmer originally claimed to have had accidental contamination of the Monsanto seeds (this defense was dropped before the actual trial itself, and if you read the actual depositions, it's really hard to actually believe this claim). It's difficult to find any other case that comes close to falling under the claimed situation here (due to the notoriety of this one case), but I don't think that any of them actually do.
Incidentally, I should point out that the underlying issues of plant patents are actually far older than GMO cases (early-mid 20th century). It's not anything actually new.
What Monsanto DID do was sue someone whose field was contaminated, and who then repeatedly sprayed the field with glyphosate to kill all but the GMO plants, so he could selectively concentrate the interlopers to continue to propagate. It's this last step that got the farmer in trouble.
> but things get very bad if people don’t have food
GMO IP protection does nothing to prevent farmers from continuing to grow previously existing varieties. So this is another scare argument without foundation.
> I think your argument is sound in a free-market maximalist / small-government libertarian framework, I’m just less convinced that the current IP framework produces good results in this case.
I think the anti-IP argument is an underhanded way to try to ban GMOs without actually saying you want to do that.
> GMO IP protection does nothing to prevent farmers from continuing to grow previously existing varieties.
If they buy seed from grain elevator which comingles GMO and non-GMO seed (which is what happened in the Bowman case) the farmer can't sell what they've grown from that seed.
https://decisions.fct-cf.gc.ca/fc-cf/decisions/en/item/38991...
As for Bowman
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-796_c07d.pdf
Bowman didn't just do that. He applied glyphosate to the field. So, he bought seeds without a license to grow them, with the intent to exploit the fact they were resistant to glyphosate. This violated the patent.
I’ll tap out here. Have a nice day.
It seems they are primarily concerned about two types of issue; one is why I’d call “safety”: gene transfer/escape into wild species, unintended ecological consequences, human safety of consuming GM plants. Tho other group is around “licensing”: essentially a deep concern about going down a path where plant seeds are licensed instead of bought, and all the “Monsanto is evil” concerns.
I think on the safety point there is some FUD about what kind of gene transfer is actually biologically possible, but you can make a more general rebuttal that selective breeding has the same risks, it’s just harder to get positive changes into your genotype. Maybe Greenpeace would argue that we’re already endangering the biosphere a bit with selective breeding, and going any faster would dramatically increase the danger.
On the licensing point, I’m very sympathetic, but I think that is an argument for IP law reform or public investment in GM, not an argument against GM itself. But of course if you believe the safety concerns then you don’t want public or private research to happen because you think it’s prima facie harmful.