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".
Obviously, a mutagen is like a bulldozer - it can modify a dozen of genes. Can make the plant more sweet, or more poisonous. But we don't care as long as the result is sweeter or bigger or whatever we like.
Then we discovered gamma rays, which do the gene splicing even better. New varieties of tomatoes, apples, potatoes, wheat etc etc. All produced through 20th century using mutation breeding.
Actually, Non-GMO Project maintains a whole list of plants that are "high risk" of being modified using CRiSPR (which they call GMO). The funniest part however that for many plants they *cannot* in any way distinguish them from non-CRiSPR (non-GMO as they call it) plants, yet they speak of "risk" and "contamination".
Here's a simple question to illustrate my point, if you have a "peanut allergy" you have an allergy to a compound produced by all or most species of peanut cultivated. There is no gene that makes any tomato, or tomato compatible plant produce this compound. No matter what a classical plant breeder does with tomatoes, you can assume its safe for anyone with a peanut allergy to eat them. Put CRISPR on the table and this isn't a safe assumption anymore. Again, I'm not saying to march in the streets, just that this is distinct, new technology (even if its to pursue a long time goal) that does have some unique concerns to its predecessor techniques.
> No matter what a classical plant breeder does with tomatoes, you can assume its safe for anyone with a peanut allergy to eat them
You cannot make this assumption due to random mutations. If prolamin protein appeared in peanut, it could appear in tomato as well.*
With CRiSPR you can be pretty certain that nobody will put peanut cupin and prolamin proteins into tomato just to cause allergy in people.
* obviously probability is close to zero due to different evolutionary paths
