Why Nigeria accepted GMOs
49 comments
·October 27, 2025redwood
bootsmann
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.
abdullahkhalids
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.
bootsmann
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.
TimTheTinker
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.
trenchpilgrim
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.
tptacek
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.
bluGill
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
gruez
>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.
bootsmann
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.
lm28469
Point 1 isn't a "might happen", it's a "will happen"
cyberax
> 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.
sdeframond
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.
bootsmann
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.
thinkingtoilet
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.
rpdillon
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/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.
mrguyorama
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.
benced
I really dislike this logic because it centers the farmers, not the people who buy agricultural products (everybody).
padjo
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
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.
kjkjadksj
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.
tick_tock_tick
> 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.
0x000xca0xfe
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.
cyberax
> 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.
abdullahkhalids
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.
arandr0x
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)
hollerith
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.
bluGill
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
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
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?
Symmetry
And before GMO essentially all modern strains were created by accelerating the mutation of plants via the application of x-rays.
xchip
Because they are poor and you can easily bribe the politicians
ryoshoe
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
darth_avocado
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/articles/PMC10695985/#:~:text=A...
kjkjadksj
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.
maddmann
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
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.
dzonga
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 ?
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.