A high degree if genetic selections is a high risk thing. For a long time you just get a lot more of what ever you want, milk, eggs, etc. And then a virus appears and kills 99.9% or more of your animals because they were all so closely related.
The free market rewards the up side of closely related species but does not cost you anything for the potential catastrophe. Day to day the probability of a catastrophic disease is near 0, but in the very long term it is near certain. Our free markets have no smart way of pricing that kind of stuff.
That's why we've already lost several varieties of banana to diseases.
> Our free markets have no smart way of pricing that kind of [potential disease catastrophe].
So true. Ireland's devastating "potato famine" was another example of the catastrophe that can result from free-market-drive overdependence on a single monoculture --- in this case the "lumper" potato variety, which was susceptible to the Phytophthora infestans blight --- with no genetic diversity [1]. It's estimated that the famine led to the death or emigration (in roughly equal numbers) of some 20% of the island's population [2].
(One of my grandmothers was first-generation Irish-American; I remember her telling stories of the famine that she'd heard passed down in her family.)
Oh yeah that's particularly scary (if you happen to like bananas). Most commercial bananas plants are clones. This leads to strict regulations on commercial bananas and it's still pretty likely we'll see them disappear one day.
Woah, wait a moment. One variety of commercial banana is mostly clones (the traditional yellow Chicquita/Dole type). There are many other kinds of bananas - less familiar, but also different genetically. Bananas won't disappear - only one type will.
Many wild, seed packet bananas exist, but all (as far as I know?) bananas that we eat have no seeds and are actually all clones. Thus they are all under the extinction by disease threat.
Someone could in theory continually keep developing new strains of bananas in case of future diseases. Practically however there is no profit in that. You could argue a charity or NGO should do stuff like this.
Note that the Gros Michel isn't extinct. It's still grown as a boutique item. But the blight is apparently persistent in fields, and thus it can't be grown in quanitity without huge risk to the plantation.
The free market rewards the up side of closely related species but does not cost you anything for the potential catastrophe. Day to day the probability of a catastrophic disease is near 0, but in the very long term it is near certain. Our free markets have no smart way of pricing that kind of stuff.
That's why we've already lost several varieties of banana to diseases.