Vendor lock-in is due to hybrid vigor, not due to GM technology.
Many modern crops are high-yielding due to hybrid vigor, when you cross two distantly related cultivars their offspring will outperform their parents. However that vigor disappears on self-crossing, so you can't reuse your own seeds. That's why the seed company has a license to print money, they have to keep on remaking these hybrids. Farmers can do that themselves which is where seed co-ops come from, but these usually don't have the internal cultivars that the seed companies use to remake the hybrids. Could be that parent A has a useful resistance and B has the high yielding variety, and both parents themselves were made in a long breeding process.
This goes back to the 1900s but had its big breakthrough with Norman Borlaug's green revolution in the 60s. He crossed Japanese dwarf wheat and Mexican 'regular' wheat to get smaller high-yielding varieties he had to keep on remaking. There was no GM involved.
There's also a safety benefit. It's plausible that these hybrids would substantially outcompete the local flora and you'd have a landscape of corn and beans.
I don't know the veracity of this, but when I've seen concerns about this raised, usually it's mentioned that something that pours so much energy into the edible part for no reproductive benefit would have a hard time outcompeting something that doesn't do this.
> It's plausible that these hybrids would substantially outcompete the local flora
This is absolutely not plausible. It's also not plausible that high-yield broiler chicken would outcompete local birds, and it's not plausible that high-yield cows would outcompete local moose, elk and deer.
It is interesting that with animals, people intuitively usually understand that high yield food producing breeds would not outcompete anything in the wild nature. But with plants, people are ready to believe scifi horror movie stories.
Many modern crops are high-yielding due to hybrid vigor, when you cross two distantly related cultivars their offspring will outperform their parents. However that vigor disappears on self-crossing, so you can't reuse your own seeds. That's why the seed company has a license to print money, they have to keep on remaking these hybrids. Farmers can do that themselves which is where seed co-ops come from, but these usually don't have the internal cultivars that the seed companies use to remake the hybrids. Could be that parent A has a useful resistance and B has the high yielding variety, and both parents themselves were made in a long breeding process.
This goes back to the 1900s but had its big breakthrough with Norman Borlaug's green revolution in the 60s. He crossed Japanese dwarf wheat and Mexican 'regular' wheat to get smaller high-yielding varieties he had to keep on remaking. There was no GM involved.
Edit: there's a very good critical essay from Lewontin on the politics of hybrid corn: https://monthlyreview.org/1986/07/01/the-political-economy-o...