I feel like this kind of discussion hinges on a misguided belief that farmers are not very smart businessmen. The idea that a farmer would abandon their current crop for GMO crop that they cannot replant without making a cost-benefit analysis in their head just strikes me as very odd. These peoples life depend on making such decisions, we should trust them to make them themselves.

Most farmers don't save seed for replanting anymore even if they're non GMO, especially if they want to be economically competitive. The $50-150/acre that seeds cost are a small fraction of the benefit of using F1 hybrid seeds due to hybrid vigor - the plants they produce have a higher yield that more than makes up for it, on the order of 15-50% higher depending on variety.

The seeds they get from a manufacturer also mature more consistently and uniformly, they do a much better job of cleaning and protecting the seed (e.g. fungicide), and usually end up costing less than doing it yourself because of the labor involved in preparing the seed for storage.

I’m fairly sure that farmers often buy seeds rather than harvesting them. There are lots of reasons for this but essentially growing seeds and growing produce is just quite different. I don’t think it’s the dramatic shift you’re making it out to be.

You do understand that your requirement effectively cuts out many modern non-GMO seeds?

One of the big advancements in the turn of the 20th century was heterosis, or the systematic exploitation of hybrid vigor. If you maintain two (or more) extremely inbred but different from each other germlines, but cross them to produce seed, you get seed that is much more heterozygotic than is naturally common. This seed is then dramatically more viable and productive. But if you replant what it yields, you only get very disappointing yield.

That is, it has been normal for farmers to buy new seed each season from some provider that specializes in making very productive seed for more than a hundred years now. Part of getting developing countries to raise their agricultural productivity to modern standards is getting them to start doing this, instead of continuously replanting their old seeds.

I think having terminator genes in seeds is a reasonable safeguard against leaking lots of novel genes into the environment above and beyond what crops from across the planet already would leak. I think this is a benefit that people too quickly dismiss. Seed saving as others have pointed out is already increasingly rare for many crops.

>I'm a believer in taking advantage of GM crops but also believe that some kind of regulation should be put in place to ensure that those crops yield seeds that can be used to plant future generations.

That's not a GMO issue, that's a hybrid issue that applies to pretty much all modern seeds. Unless you're specifically worried about so-called terminator seeds, a common boogeyman discussed by organic farming proponents, but those have never been on the market and there is basically a worldwide ban on them.

To this day nobody in the agritech industry touting expensive super seeds and synthetics has figured out how to sustainably sell their products to developing countries.

Agriculture is the primary industry in most developing nations. The value proposition of agritech is "give us your money and we'll give you food". Meanwhile the people in developed countries need a way to turn what they already produce into money. The objectives are diametrically opposed.

How exactly is an agricultural society that primarily produces crops to feed itself pay for the imported goods which were the source of their money in the past? What I'm trying to get at here is the fact that a domestic farmer has to export their crops to earn money for the imported inputs. You need more land to feed the same quantity of people, because only a portion of the land will be farmed for domestic consumption.

The business model just fundamentally doesn't make much sense, because it makes the underlying assumption that these people are already busy doing more important things than farming that earn them enough money to buy seeds, so buying the more productive seeds means they are less busy farming and spend more time earning money.

From a practical standpoint that is difficult to do. E.g. many crops are hybrid species taking advantage of hybrid vigor (1). If the hybrid is fertile at all will be quite variable in phenotypes.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosis

> I'm a believer in taking advantage of GM crops but also believe that some kind of regulation should be put in place to ensure that those crops yield seeds that can be used to plant future generations.

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.

I really dislike this logic because it centers the farmers, not the people who buy agricultural products (everybody).

"going against the grain" --- was that deliberate? ;-)

Apple trees are weird. You can take a seed from an apple tree in your yard and grow apples that taste disgusting. One of the apples from that disgusting tree might make apples that taste absolutely heavenly. You can't just grow an apple tree from seed and expect anything other than an apple only fit for making alcohol. Johnny Appleseed was keeping folks drunk, not healthy.

Hybrids sometimes produce no seeds or seeds that won't grow the same thing. Sometimes this is desirable - seedless watermelons, for example. Or having a plant that grows better in your region at the cost of having to buy seeds (which you were likely to do in modern times regardless).

I get your point, but this isn't really a problem that's special to GMOs in particular. It is a problem now, and it isn't always that horrible of one. We can support farmers better now and prevent some of it now.

On the other hand fertile GMOs will sooner or later mix into the surrounding nature, compete with local plants and undergo "normal" evolution. This might be undesirable.

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.

> read about farmer suicides in India related to this topic

The data doesn’t support this claim

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers%27_suicides_in_India#G...

> but also believe that some kind of regulation should be put in place to ensure that those crops yield seeds that can be used to plant future generations.

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.

> 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.

I would assume the opposite. The more authoritarian the country, the fewer people who need to be bribed to get what you want, generally speaking (placing things like lobbying under the umbrella of bribes).

Is there not a confounding factor at play that a more functional government would facilitate both more democracy and more legislation on newer technology? Is this notion that "it might be nice to help your target market have a generally working government to facilitate them being willing to divert money towards non-corruption goals and able to protect your market with laws" really that new?

(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)

I agree: at first glance it is a very flimsy argument -- made by an organization whose entire purpose seems to be to advocate for what they consider to be technological progress specifically in the biological domain.

From my perspective, this is a slightly naive opinion. I believe we're not fighting against GMOs because "mutations are bad". When activists point that out, it's because it's the easiest way to reach the general population and convince them to get behind the cause.

The real reason, however, are the political and economical implications of GMOs. Sure, they say they'll use them to fight famine. But in reality, they'll just try to extract as much profit as they can, regardless of the interests of the people growing the plants and eating the food. We've seen farmers get sued (see Bowman v Monsanto) and other evil stuff like that.

One common drawback of GM crops is the monopolistic nature of their seeds. They come with a license and a cost to use, you cannot save seeds and use them later. So it seems like a threat to the sovereignty of a Country.

The article briefly mentions that initially some seeds are given with royalty free licenses, but for how long?

Why not? First, the safety reason: random mutations (and selective breeding) are to genetic engineering as a pedestrian is to a 747 jet. The range of possibilities and the speed at which they can be realized is far greater with genetic engineering.

But, supposing there are rigorous tests and only well understood, small alterations are permitted, there is the second reason: economics. E.g. what will a country do when a GMO seed company starts taking over farms?

Like store-brand products in supermarkets, such company farms have a competitive advantage in that they can get seeds cheaper, so it could happen they slowly take over all farming. And even independent farms would be in the precarious position of depending on a small handful of global companies for their seeds. If they don't comply with the demands of these seed companies, they'd go out of business, unable to compete. Yes there are seed companies already, but the barrier to entry, degree of consolidation, and advantage gained by doing business with them, is less than when you need genetic engineering to stay in the race, so the risk of such sovereignty-wrecking monopolies is much greater with GM seeds.

And third, the health reason (distinct from safety). When companies are allowed to engineer food as they want, we get Snickers bars and Coca Cola. Do we want to unleash these same corporate practices on plants themselves? Why do we believe business pressures will get us only things like drought-resistant and vitamin-enriched rice, and not some rice variant that sacrifices nutrients to increase yield or taste? Currently, the healthiest foods are those with the least corporate engineering. What reason is there to believe this will change with GMOs?

And before GMO essentially all modern strains were created by accelerating the mutation of plants via the application of x-rays.

Because GMOs are superior

Regardless of potential bribes to politicians, its easy to look at the increased yields from GMO foods as a benefit for a country where ~20% of the population are undernourished

https://www.globalhungerindex.org/nigeria.html

Did you read the article? I think this case study shows why gm is likely to be key to avoiding mass starvation as climate change becomes a bigger issue.