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Is genetically modified seed giant Monsanto doing the unthinkable and moving away from genetically modified seeds?

It sounds crazy, but hear me out. Let’s start with Monsanto’s vegetable division, Seminis, which boasts it is the “largest developer and grower of vegetable seeds in the world.” Monsanto acknowledges Seminis has no new GM vegetables in development. According to a recent
Wired piece, Seminis has has reverted instead to “good old-fashioned crossbreeding, the same technology that farmers have been using to optimize crops for millennia.”

Why? The article points to people’s growing avoidance of genetically modified foods. So far, consumers have shown no appetite to gobble up GM vegetables. (But that doesn’t mean people aren’t eating GMOs: Nearly all GMOs currently on the market are big commodity crops like corn and soy, which, besides being used as livestock feed, are regularly used as ingredients in processed food-think high-fructose corn syrup and soy oil.)

But the
Wired piece also suggests a factor that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: GM technology doesn’t seem to be very good at generating complex traits like better flavor or more nutrients, the very attributes Monsanto was hoping to engineer into veggies. Here’s
Wired:

Furthermore, genetically modifying consumer crops proved to be inefficient and expensive. [Monsanto exec David] Stark estimates that adding a new gene takes roughly 10 years and $100 million to go from a product concept to regulatory approval.
And inserting genes one at a time doesn’t necessarily produce the kinds of traits that rely on the inter­actions of several genes. Well before their veggie business went kaput,
Monsanto knew it couldn’t just genetically modify its way to better produce; it had to breed great vegetables to begin with. As Stark phrases a company mantra: “The best gene in the world doesn’t fix dogshit germplasm.” [Emphasis added.]