Talk:Fair trade

The GMO section

"There is however one major potential drawback to GMO foods; increased yield. This is great for an individual farmer, but not the industry. The demand for food is relatively inelastic; even if the price of food were free, most people's stomachs are not an endless abyss with an insatiable lust for consumption. The result being, somewhat counterintuitively, an increase in the total food supply will decrease total revenue. Farmers have an incentive to, as an industry, underproduce, while as individuals they will overproduce. "

I believe that this may be flawed because the individual farmers still have an incentive to use GMO's if it can decrease their individual cost structure. What I have seen happen then is the overall price drops for the commodity produced, and less efficient producers are forced to leave the market. Sometimes the government will step in to create a cartel in the market, such as the Canadian Wheat Board. I also think that if the use of GMO's could decrease the cost structure for intermediaries within the industry, increasing their own revenues. A main problem about the above argument is it could be re-written to be about any improvement in agriculture.

This could also use some clarification as to what "industry" refers to in the paragraph.

Someone should also provide a citation (or some type of detailed, outside clarification), and maybe we could link it in a further reading section.

I also did not see this argument in the actual rational-wiki GMO page.Make haste slowly (talk) 11:03, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

It's only a problem to the producer; society at whole benefits. It goes a long way to explaining just why farmers want organic and oppose GMO, as they want to restrict supply. CorruptUser (talk) 11:53, 6 June 2015 (UTC)