[HN Gopher] Why Nigeria accepted GMOs
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Why Nigeria accepted GMOs
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 36 points
Date : 2025-10-27 17:42 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.asimov.press)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.asimov.press)
| xchip wrote:
| Because they are poor and you can easily bribe the politicians
| maddmann wrote:
| 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.
| mothballed wrote:
| The government can't even make a dent into wars between
| farmers and livestock herders.
|
| Any political control or statement on GMOs are largely
| theater. They have next to no means to prohibit it nor
| subsidize it.
| ryoshoe wrote:
| 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
| darth_avocado wrote:
| It is an artificial dichotomy tbh. When you say GMO foods,
| you usually refer to foods that have been introduced to
| populations across the globe in environments they are not
| suitable to be grown in. Yes GMO rice will probably grow
| better and feed more people in drought prone regions of
| India, but so would the indigenous millets that were replaced
| by rice. They require less water (and fertilizers and
| pesticides that GMOs require), are more resilient to climate
| events and more suitable to local climate. Not saying GMO
| foods are A solution, just that they aren't the ONLY solution
| if the goal was to feed enough people.
|
| Some additional reading: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article
| s/PMC10695985/#:~:text=A...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Behavior follows costs. There is probably some stumbling
| block regarding millets. That being said, seed companies
| are very interested in land races, do not be mistaken. They
| are a good source of phenotypic variation and potential
| traits that might be favorable to introduce into the elite
| cultivars.
| dzonga wrote:
| maybe we need to ask why was Nigeria in a place to accept GMOs
| being pushed by the Gates Foundation ?
|
| what are the conditions that led to that outcome ?
| trallnag wrote:
| Because GMOs are superior
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| From the TFA
|
| > 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.
| hollerith wrote:
| 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.
| kranke155 wrote:
| GMOs allowed for the huge expansion on the use of pesticides
| in America, since the crops are "pesticide ready".
| Symmetry wrote:
| They've allowed for a huge expansion of the use of
| herbicide but drastically reduced the use of insecticide.
| I'd much rather have the former than the later.
| arandr0x wrote:
| 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)
| redwood wrote:
| 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.
| bootsmann wrote:
| 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.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://youtu.be/CxVXvFOPIyQ?t=1567
| bootsmann wrote:
| Valid points but this seems more simple to address using
| regulation rather than removing the seed patents (which are
| essential to some degree to make this whole process
| worthwhile for manufacturers). The argument is that without
| seed patents most of the genuine advancements would not be
| worth pursuing.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| What regulation would you propose to fix either of these
| issues?
|
| 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.
| bootsmann wrote:
| If a factory pours poison into a farmers water source
| they can already sue, I cannot imagine it would be
| significantly harder to enable similar regulation for
| fertilizers and pesticides.
| trenchpilgrim wrote:
| The legal costs would bankrupt most non-corporate farms.
| (In fact that's what happened - as explained in the link
| in that comment, many farmers had to settle even if they
| believed themselves innocent.)
|
| 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.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Yes, that very famously worked for PFAS poisoned waters
| by DuPont in the US.
|
| It's still ongoing and we're 24 years later.
| Veserv wrote:
| Monsanto has already made legally binding declarations
| that they will never sue for "simply having GMO plants in
| a field" or "accidentally growing trace amounts of
| patented crops" which have been affirmatively held as
| legally binding [1].
|
| 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/2013/06/12/19097
| 7225/co...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto_Canada_Inc_v_S
| chmeise...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowman_v._Monsanto_Co.
| 8note wrote:
| this is still based on the idea that farmers are bad
| businessmen, and couldnt find the seed innovation because
| it would result in better crops.
|
| if the advancement is genuinely worthwhile, farmers are
| going to make it happen
| bootsmann wrote:
| The whole point of the G in GMO is that you don't get
| these plants by the usual technique of selecting good
| strains produced by natural gene variance.
| lm28469 wrote:
| Point 1 isn't a "might happen", it's a "will happen"
| bluGill wrote:
| 1 - farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an
| issue. the epa requires this in the us and they look at
| drift before approving spray
|
| 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
| Y-bar wrote:
| > farmers watch the wind and won't spray when drift is an
| issue
|
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It doesn't force a mono-supplier, since existing seeds
| are not suddenly made unavailable when new seeds are
| brought to market.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| We have a small-ish farm in Oregon. We religiously watch
| the wind before spraying for two reasons:
|
| 1) Chemicals are extremely expensive and chemicals that
| drift off the field are wasted, not to mention that in
| high winds you can't be confident in good coverage
| (unless you just dramatically increase your spray amount,
| which, see again re: cost). 2) Despite our extreme care,
| we have had regulatory bodies called on us by neighbours
| about drift (investigation exonerated us).
|
| Thus we have both an internal, selfish reason to not
| spray during high wands and an external reason to not
| spray during high winds. I can't speak to other areas of
| the country (let alone the world) or other kinds of
| farming.
| cyberax wrote:
| > 1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop
| field, killing your non-GMO crops
|
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Monsanto Derangement Syndrome got Veritasium? Geez...
| gruez wrote:
| >1. The chemicals are carried by the wind onto your crop
| field, killing your non-GMO crops
|
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > 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 has never happened, and for good legal reasons.
|
| What has happened is when a farmer that had some
| contamination then deliberately sprayed his field to
| concentrate it and then replant those seeds. That was
| rightly seen as deliberate patent infringement. The
| deliberate spraying was the key part of that.
| sdeframond wrote:
| Many businesses are not thinking long term. Farming
| businesses are businesses too, and may prefer short term
| profitability over long term sustainability.
|
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer
| bootsmann wrote:
| This is a tragedy of the commons and not comparable to a
| singular farmer making a singular decision about what to
| plant on his field.
| michaelt wrote:
| Imagine if hypothetically a supplier offered very
| competitive - maybe even loss-making - prices when they
| had 25% of the market; then once they had 90% of the
| market and most of their competitors had gone out of
| business, they planned to raise prices substantially,
| make back the loss, and produce a big profit.
|
| Isn't each customer's decision to buy (or not buy) from
| the loss-making supplier a tragedy-of-the-commons
| situation?
| mothballed wrote:
| I struggle for an example of that actually working. If it
| does it must be exceedingly rare. I can think of lots of
| example of having 25% of the market and then getting
| closer to the majority by cutting prices, but the part
| where they jack them back up usually doesn't work. For
| instance, Rockefeller did that to put his competition out
| of business, but then the price of Kerosene just kept
| going down.
|
| The times where it actually worked (railroad) was because
| the people doing it convinced the government afterwards
| to "protect the market" (interstate commerce act) and
| created a violence enforced cartel that prohibited by law
| rebates and other methods by which cartels (and pre-ICA
| railroad cartels) commonly fall apart.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Are they? Farmers in the US just went a full month without
| selling a single soy bean to China. The last time it happened
| was seven years ago. Guess who was president both times it
| happened. Guess who farmers overwhelmingly voted for? They
| regularly vote against their own business interests. Perhaps
| farmers in Nigeria are better educated.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The entire reason almost every modern country _massively
| subsidizes and manages_ the staple food crops of their
| agricultural economy is that letting them _rationally act
| in their best interests_ kept causing famines when farmers
| did dumb things, like _cause the dust bowl_.
|
| 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.
| rpdillon wrote:
| I think farmers know about the trade war that Trump will
| create, but they also think he will do other things to help
| them.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2025/10/02/tr
| u...
|
| 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.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| They do not.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| In a multi-agent dynamic system, the optimal actions by each
| individual agents (based on whatever cost-benefit analysis
| they do) can evolve the system into a state where every agent
| is worse off compared to some initial state. This holds even
| if every individual agent is a "smart businessperson".
|
| 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.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| Great point.
|
| 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.
| bootsmann wrote:
| This is true in the abstract but I don't see how it applies
| to this specific case. There are two agents here and the
| GMO plants will only be planted if planting them is the
| optimal choice for both.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I don't think you can arbitrarily leave out all the other
| parties in the agricultural system: the bank, who the
| farmer may need to borrow from to buy seed, the
| politicians, who may or may not accept money from the
| companies producing GMO seeds to produce favourable
| legislation, the public, who may vote with their wallets
| when purchasing the resulting crops, and so on...
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Moloch: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-
| on-moloch/
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I can't think of a more complete "Jack of all trades" than
| the modern farmer.
| estimator7292 wrote:
| The problem is that even with the seed rent-seeking, GMO
| crops are more productive and more profitable.
|
| The farmer still makes just enough money, with some corporate
| middleman skimming off the top for no good reason. It's not
| that the fees are untenable- obviously nobody will buy it if
| they can't make a profit. The problem is the corporate rent-
| seeking. Producers have to raise costs which percolates up
| into increased costs for consumers.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| What would stop them from jacking up prices when they have
| monopoly? It's not like we haven't seen this scenario
| before..
| NoahZuniga wrote:
| How are the food costs raising if GMO crops are more
| productive? Shouldn't this increase supply and lower
| prices?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Especially when farmers have been making this kind of
| decision for nearly a century, back from when hybrid seeds
| were introduced. Hybrid seeds don't breed true so no farmer
| would replant the result of growing them.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| > 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| Farmers want sterile crops. last years seed in this years
| field is a weed that messes with your crop rotation plan
| without any upsides.
| cyberax wrote:
| > 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.
| 0x000xca0xfe wrote:
| 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.
| padjo wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It depends on the crop. With cereals, the seed is the
| product, and you could divert a part of production to next
| year's planting. With other crops, harvest may happen before
| seeds mature and may require special processing to extract
| them for the seed producers.
| bluGill wrote:
| If you are planting hybrid seeds you would never save seeds
| because their children don't yield well. Hybrid yields so
| much better that it isn't worth planting anything else if
| you have the option.
| benced wrote:
| I really dislike this logic because it centers the farmers, not
| the people who buy agricultural products (everybody).
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| 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.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| The real question is why anyone would not.
|
| 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.
| jackbravo wrote:
| 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?
| gruez wrote:
| 1. as others have mentioned in a sibling thread, "saving
| seeds" isn't really a thing that can be done with modern
| crops, GMO or not.
|
| 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?
| bluGill wrote:
| The patents are expiring. Many of the useful traits are no
| longer under patent.
|
| even ignoring that things the patents were easy for golden
| rice to license.
| https://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how9_IP.php
| Symmetry wrote:
| And before GMO essentially all modern strains were created by
| accelerating the mutation of plants via the application of
| x-rays.
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