I agree that GMOs are not the real problem in this story.
Organizations often do some very devious things to sustenance farmers who have few sources of reliable information and few choices in their economic lives.
In Northern Cameroon, at some point, someone convinced a large portion of the sustenance farmers to use their small, arid fields to grow cotton. The theory was that this cotton could be sold, providing them with more options than a granary of sorghum does, and building a nice export industry with which to capture hard currency to buy much-needed foreign manufactured goods (and, perhaps more likely, foreign luxury goods.) I couldn’t tell you who did this, but I do know that the cotton board was partially French-owned, and Cameroon was at the time close to being the most corrupt country on earth. The farmers involved were not dumb, but they were largely illiterate, had very little experience outside their village, and most likely had rarely held more than a few dollars in their hands.
These farmers, who had eked out a modest existence by growing local grains for centuries, quickly found that their fields were very poorly suited for cotton. Cotton requires a lot of inputs, and these can only be purchased with cash. So farmers borrowed money from the cotton marketing boards for the inputs. At they end of the year, the cotton company (which owned the large vehicles and maintained the roads) came in and bought the finished output. The profits often weren’t enough to cover the farmers debt, meaning that the farmers would be forced to borrow even more inputs so they could grow more cotton (which was the only cash crop they could get to a real market) and hope to get out of debt the next year.
In the meantime, cotton is a terrible crop for your soil, especially in these marginal areas. Each year, the yield would get worse and worse, both for cotton and for the food grown along side it. Now we have a bunch of broke, indebted farmers whose land is no longer productive enough to even grow sustenance level food. Beyond the social problem of rural poverty, this spreads crime, urban blight, and other problems caused as the communities fall apart and the young men go to the cities to look for work.
Anyway, I don’t know who to blame or what the answer is, but when your fuck with agriculture it pays to be extra careful about the larger ramifications of what you are doing.