there is a lot of nuance and challenging trade-offs, also big players, subsidies, and potential regulatory capture. TO an extent, technology has unquestionably improved agriculture, and arguably, beyond a point, technology is being used for profits at the expense of ecological and dietary health. the calculus has been based on minimizing human labor and maximizing profits via useage of subsidized fossil fuel. One specific vision of the economy.
Yes, there is the farming 1e9 acres with mostly automated mega-machines and a few decorative human operators. There is also Curtis Stone and JM Fortier making 6 figures on less than an acre. If you decide one thing is the answer and subsidize it, you've made your own conclusion instead of letting the market decide.
Farming subsidies etc are the reality in high-income countries like UE or USA. But UE doesn't really *need* GMO because it can produce huge amounts of cheap food already.
GMO is needed in the first place by low-income countries in Africa and Asia, which still experience famines or vitamin deficits in 21st century! And here you have Greenpeace "heroically" destroying Golden Rice or Bt brinjal crops for the sake of... "purity" and fanatics like Vandana Shiva.
And the OP of this thread imo just doesn't understand that the term GMO is commonly used to refer to certain advanced gene editting techniques bypassing the typical plant reproductive cycles, requiring a laboratory and done for the first time in the 1990s, as a distinct technique within the more general category of "intentional breeding" that has been going on for thousands of years.
By ignoring the common use of GMO and parsing each word individually, you can argue that GMO is the whole broad category JUST so you can make fun of people based on a technicality of your own definition?
Its like how a bunch of studies, data, and models were combined about climate, atmosphere, themodynamics, industry, population growth, etc were used to make some alarming projections, and they called the overall concept "Global Warming" and despite predicting more extreme weather events including winter storms, it gets constantly "disproved" by people who think "Global Warming" literally just means global warming.
Its fine if you want define GMO like this, but then provide another term for specifically laboratory gene splicing from different species or synthesized genes.
I'm not saying all of the concerns are justified, but there are SOME concerns that apply to GMO, and its inaccurate to write them off as "we've literally been doing this for thousands of years".
So the natural state was essentially eating what grows out there. Ancient breeding was waiting for random mutations. Mutagens were like bulldozer, this is like a scalpel, safe and precise.
And... now the hell unleashes, people marching against "Frankenfood" and all this. I hope you now understand why this whole GMO war is so frustrating for anyone who really understands how this works.
> this capability gives me control over the outcome
But this is precisely what what it does and we've been doing for 11'000 years.
We've been waiting for a random bytes to change in firefox.exe to maybe see if it runs faster or eats less memory.
Then for 100 years we rammed firefox.exe with a fuzzer replacing not only but hundreds of bytes, and it worked very well.
Now patch a single byte, and people are suddenly marching...
All I'm saying, is recognize that its in its own category. People who think everything in this category is bad are wrong, but it is still a distinct category. If you want to call it Happy and Fun Gene Editting instead of GMO, that's fine.
