I think if you drill down on many (all?) anti-GMO arguments you will find the evidence for them really isn't there. It's remarkable how the whole ideological edifice is built on nothing.
Occam's razor suggests the best strategy - if available - is to suppress natural reproduction, if you were in possession of a superior genetic strain, in order to stay ahead of the market. Suppressing natural reproduction is the same general principle as suppressing others using your idea/strategy/copyright.
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.
> 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.
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.
No one is holding a gun to farmers' heads forcing them to buy GMO seeds. If a particular kind of seed doesn't increase their profit they won't buy it. The older non-GMO seeds will still be around. They won't be outlawed.
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.
I think the worry is that you get the biased against reproduction genes that make a lot of sense for a for profit GMO plant that hop to normal plants and reduce their ability to reproduce.
If it reduced the plants' ability to reproduce, surely that would not spread in a population. So that seems no different from any other deleterious mutation. Such mutations happen all the time in any population.
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...
