The short answer is yes.
It's happening now in many markets. Is it universal, and is every product uniquely differentiated for end consumers? No, because there's not enough value in some of those markets to justify the full differentiation.
For virtually every product line where there are GM crops, there are alternate, competing, differentiated attributes. They may be functional attributes that are either GM or non-GM. They may be organic. They may be using a whole variety of other provenance-based elements. Some of it's simply just branded products that somebody thinks have a slightly higher quality control around them.
Yes, we can do it. The challenge, though, is that we have quite diffuse and conflicting international standards, and as long as the governments of the day around the world all want to occupy the centre space and define what are the thresholds for entering or not entering a market, the industry can't step in and do that.
In a few cases, government has done it—drawn the lines—and the markets are being satisfied. In a few places where the government has said, “We're not sure where the line is, but we reserve the right to define the line”, markets have a difficulty stepping in because they'll almost universally be in the wrong space to satisfy regulators down the road. Where the state has said, “We're not going to draw the boundary, that's your job because it's a relationship between the buyer and the seller”--this is not about safety, this is not a safety issue, this is about quality attributes and what people want and are willing to pay for and it's possible to supply--in those cases there have been very effective supply chains that develop that benefit the producers and consumers, both within the supply chain and the other elements in the food chain.
The short answer is yes, it can be done. It's being done pretty much around the world, not just in developed countries, where there are high incomes, but in developing countries as well.
The challenge is that we're spending way more than we should to differentiate those product categories, because we're reinventing the wheel in every market.
If I take you back 50 years, we spent an inordinate amount of our energy as governments trying to harmonize, so that whoever brought a product to market quality assured that product. Now we've renationalized, so we have upwards of 70 or 80 countries who say, “That might be okay, we might accept that it's safe, but we're not quite sure whether it fits with the consumer and producer demands in our market.” The difficulty is that we don't know what those consumer and producer demands are. It's just another group of people making choices. What we've found is that where these supply chains work, it's because buyers and sellers sit down and say, “This is what we want, this is what we'll pay for; this is what the cost will be, and there's value there.”
The numbers coming out of our conference are that about half of the value that could be generated by GM crops has been truncated in the marketplace. We're talking about $5 billion to $10 billion worth of wealth.