Rejecting GMOs hinders human progress and keeps the poor hungry

Agreed.

This particular piece is hot garbage, and the entire operation has many hallmarks of astroturf.

> We definitely need more GMO crops to feed the planet

That, too, is debatable. Google "Do we have enough food" - we could feed 10B people with what we produce. Feeding the world is currently more a matter of donating (who pays?) and distributing it, not so much of producing the food in the first place.

> namely the lack of pesticides, of which some may be dangerous (but often regulated)

There is also overfertilization, which puts nitrates into ground and ultimately drinking water, and the over-use of herbicide, which massively strains local ecosystems to their collapse. The farmer revolts in Europe over the last 1-2 years have shown how politically difficult any kind of regulation in this area is. The EU is now backing down. It seems to be very difficult to find a middle ground in the "excessive vs. organic" spectrum.

A lot of poor countries have a large proportion of subsistence farmers that are living off the land and are not participating in any form of formal economy. That is how you get those less than two dollars a day figures. They simply aren't using money. The food they produce and eat is definitely worth two dollars. When you look at the economics of commercial farming, most of the cost is spent on inputs such as synthetic fertilizer and seeds. There was a hybrid rice company telling you, you can earn a whopping $1000 per unit of land, all you have to do is pay them $800 for the inputs. You still have to pay for the land and the equipment. The seed and fertilizer companies are earning most of the money. Meanwhile if you are a simple subsistence farmer you don't have a thousand dollars, so you will have to borrow the money and if your country isn't self sufficient agriculturally and bleeding money because of trade deficits then what is it exporting to buy the inputs? It is not like you are selling basic necessities to some high tech country that is better off doing something else. So you borrow money from foreign countries in a foreign currency, a currency that is much more stable than yours. This is hardly a business model that works for the poor. Whenever people talk about GMOs, they think the fundamental problem of agriculture is that there is an insufficient quantity of food, when the actual problem is that the economy needs to formalise and poor people need access to markets to buy or sell things.

Organic crops aren't free of pesticides. They can use organic pesticides. As if something organic must be healthier/ecological.

Arsenic is organic.

Crazy to consider we already forgot about other big ideas that ended in a pandemic because gain of function research conducted in a lab. And now companies like Montesanto want to push more such dangerous ideas by arguing it is to combat hunger.

Having more humans on the planet is not the solution to climate change. And science isn't going to save our ass from it.

Sustainable agriculture is not about monoculture farming GMO crops while the rest of the environment gets obliterated by the practice.

Utterly stupid.