That in a nutshell is the problem. For thousands of years plant breeding was actually in the hands of the farmers. In later years with the development of science, we had university and government funded agronomists or agricultural scientists who could also work on developing new strains and varieties of crops to increase resistance to diseases, meet changing climactic conditions etc. However those specialists also had access to a wide variety of seeds kept alive and viable by small farmers all over the world.
Nowadays the small farmers, the traditional guardians of bio-diversity in the world's seed supply, are either being forced into growing only the patented GMO products (e.g. GM cotton in India), or are being forced off the land entirely in the name of "efficiency" as factory farming practices, including growing just a relatively few strains of the world's major agricultural crops on large swaths of land in monocultures, continue to be on the increase worldwide.
This entails a loss of seed varieties and the indigenous knowledge about their seeds held by the small/peasant farmers around the world. This in turn threatens to destroy the very genetic diversity that allows the factory farming approach to remain at all viable. In addition the trend today is to allow agribusiness, multinational giants like Monsanto and Cargill etc. to increasingly fund agricultural science departments in the universities, and they are doing this more because they count on their corporate "donations" to result in research that will bring increased profits for them, rather than any altruistic desire to better the lot of humanity (although I am sure they would like us to believe differently). This would naturally tend to limit the scope of a scientists work if he knows his research grants will only keep rolling in as long as Monsanto or Cargill or whoever is funding his projects will see increased profits as a result.
“The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science”
Agro-ecologist Don Lotter published a paper titled “The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science” in the 2009 edition of the peer-reviewed International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food.
The paper makes a damning case against genetically modified foods, saying the technology is based on obsolete science, that biotechnology companies such as Monsanto have too much influence on government regulators and “public” universities, and that university scientists are ignoring the health and environmental risks of GM crops. Lotter calls the introduction of GM foods the “largest diet experiment in history.”
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Do you think any US university would fund studies on GM food safety?
DL: No, they are not doing that. Anyone who tries to conduct research looking at GM food safety is given trouble.
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Unfortunately, non-proprietary solutions don’t get funding.
We can show that organic farming systems promote drought resistance; the Rodale Institute did this research. But if a GM crop had been found to resist drought, there would have been major news headlines saying that it will save the world.
http://www.non-gmoreport.com/articles/nov09/scientists_criticizing_gm_foods.php
However, as you correctly pointed out plant breeders whether they work for multinational agribusinesses or a government owned agriculture lab in some far distant, third world country need to work almost continuously developing new varieties and strains of crops which might have the resistance they need to combat plant disease, changes in soil conditions/climate etc. With an accelerating loss of bio-diversity we run an increasing risk that plant breeders will be unable to find the traits they need in a timely fashion to prevent a widespread crop failure at some point in the future.
This video from Real News Network (7min) also discusses the risk we run when we lose bio-diversity in our major food sources:
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