surprisetalkWhy Nigeria accepted GMOs
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.
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.
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.
If your neighbor planted a GMO crop in their field, and then sprayed them with the compatible chemicals, two things might happen:
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.
Exposing Why Farmers Can't Legally Replant Their Own Seeds
This (2) case is, I think, mostly (maybe entirely) false. In every case I've read where this was claimed, the actual fact pattern was that the "victim" farmer wound up with unlicensed herbicide/pesticide-resistant crops that they then sprayed with herbicide or pesticide. If you plant unlicensed Roundup-Ready seeds and then spray the crop with Roundup, you know what you were doing.