what are the conditions that led to that outcome ?
> In general, a higher democracy index correlates with greater GM acceptance, although large differences exist between individual nations.5 South America contains both pro-GM and GM-skeptical nations. When comparing the two using the Democracy Index, however, the pro-GM countries have a consistently higher Democracy Index (6.8) than those that ban GM (4.4). Similarly, the mean Democracy Index for Sub-Saharan African countries that cultivate or are currently legislating towards GM crop cultivation (4.7) is higher than those that ban it (3.5).
> This suggests that fostering democratic accountability is not simply a political good in itself, but also a precursor for enabling science-based agriculture. For countries looking to promote GM, the priority may not be exporting “democracy” wholesale, but supporting governments in building credibility, transparency, and public trust — the very conditions under which new technologies can take root.
This makes this piece sound like a political propaganda post. There is no concrete causal mechanism posited here, just vague assertions. Two seconds of thought would reveal that all non-democratic countries have adopted technologies of all sorts. And people in those countries use technologies extensively in daily life.
I would assume it is easier for corporations to spread bribes around in a decentralized decision making system like representative democracy, than it is in centralized authoritarian systems.
(Here the model would be that democracy is something that countries develop once they have some OK government systems, not that democracy in itself makes those systems better, but it works with the causation the other way too)
If these crops are designed to require you to buy from a producing company each year, that just seems so fundamentally artificial and going against the grain of all of our agricultural history. And I can see how much of a slippery slope it can represent... ayou read about farmer suicides in India related to this topic. I bring this up because the fact that none of this is discussed in the article makes me fear it's got a profit agenda.
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.
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.
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.
It's still ongoing and we're 24 years later.
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...
if the advancement is genuinely worthwhile, farmers are going to make it happen
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you mistype? I think in general it should be 100% illegal with guaranteed jail time to to make any non sterile otherwise we are just going to create our own invasive species.
This hasn't been that useful for quite a while. Most modern crops are hybrids that rapidly degrade if they are just replanted year after year.
Another consideration is that optimizing one or two features like yield or resistance in plants often affects other areas negatively like adaptability or fertiliy. Making fertile GMOs with the same yield is probably harder than making infertile ones.
But at the very least it should not be possible to patent or copyright DNA or any other parts of living organisms, what an utterly horrible idea.
Before you reply remember random mutation is common - normal in nature. what is the difference between a random mutation and one a scientist comes up with. So far the only one I've found is random mutation isn't studied for safety.
The article briefly mentions that initially some seeds are given with royalty free licenses, but for how long?
2. If you get a productivity boost from GMO, and but then GMO company goes rogue, can't you still go back to planting regular seeds?
xchip•2h ago
maddmann•2h ago
mothballed•2h ago
Any political control or statement on GMOs are largely theater. They have next to no means to prohibit it nor subsidize it.
ryoshoe•2h ago
https://www.globalhungerindex.org/nigeria.html
darth_avocado•1h ago
Some additional reading: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10695985/#:~:text=A...
kjkjadksj•1h ago