I think the point of it (or one of the points) was that that market of of people who would pay a premium, was way, way smaller than everyone used to think it was.
Self reporting - essentially asking people if they would pay a premium, enough people always replied that they would, to make it seem as if there was a sizeable global market that would pay the premium.
If I recall correctly, wihen push came to shove at the till though, their work suggested that that global market, was tiny.
A few years ago I sat in on a talk from a chap by the name of John Knight, who was at the time an economics prof down at Otago. He'd been doing some work with people in Europe, and they'd come to the conclusion that, people usually say they would prefer to buy non-GMO foods, but ...
I think that was the rough summary. Not sure how much further that research went, but I thought it was interesting. I ... think this was it - https://www.gefree.org.nz/assets/Clean-Green-Book-email-11.pdf
I don't know that I was ever entirely convinced that there was huge potential for charging a premium due to being a non-GMO country. For a whole bunch of other reasons though, fully on board with your summation: "We suck at Capitalism" :)
There's even a name for this - Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.
At this stage in human history, a community or forum where all are welcome is impossible. If one leaves a forum open for those who are intolerant, then the forum effectively becomes closed to those that they are intolerant of. It's not a problem with forums or how communities are managed, the problem is humans being humans. Maybe in a thousand years time or so ...
At best communities get to choose what they tolerate. I've found in the past that those who demand tolerance of fairly toxic views, fail to remember that tolerance isn't, nor should it be, unlimited.
While Porsche might make a shit-tonne of money from a eye-watering markups to appeal to people with more money that taste, their costs are spectacularly high, and they employ large amounts of highly competent engineers (the car companies at least, I doubt Louis Vuitton does) and marketers to make a premium product. Advertising the production of our agricultural sector as non-GMO was never going to turn in into a premium product. My assumption is that our produce is looked up favorably in foreign markets, as good, but not necessarily premium. Some of it is marketed as premium, but trying to upscale our entire agricultural sector to that level would I suspect, fail magnificently. You can bring together the people needed to do something like that at a company level, but at a country level - I just don't think there's a sufficient number of highly competent people to be able to do that.
And we wouldn't have been the only ones appealing to that market. Gambling the entire agricultural sector on being able to dominate that tiny sector would be incredibly dangerous.
I don't disagree that we're awful at capitalism though.
My current pick for illustrating that would be Fonterra - it's my understanding that the vast majority of Fonterra's exports are milk powder bound for a spectacularly large range of industrial uses. Overseas, there are companies slowly ramping up the production of milk grown in vats using GE yeast. Produces milk powder with a fraction of the resources a dairy farm, with a fraction of the environmental costs. Companies who use milk powder as part of an industrial process don't care whether it came from a vat full of yeast or a lovely open air dairy farm. And as best I can tell, Fonterra doesn't think this is likely to cause any problems. Fonterra could try and move all of that production to premium produce for the consumer, but if that market existed, I would have thought they would have already done it. I don't think the problem here is that they are selling to the wrong sector or not marketing their produce as well as they could - I think it's that we produce too much milk. We pile all of our eggs in one basket and then insist that that's not a potential problem.