Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think "incremental" is a bit of an understatement if we can, for example, feed tens of millions of humans in parts of the world where conventional crops cannot (yet?) provide reliable and sufficient nutrition, a critical step in reducing poverty. You can argue about many benefits, but genetic engineered crops is hardly a solution to poverty and malnutrition.
Apologies if I'm off base, but can you correct my logic? If GMOs[1] can enable the growth of more productive and nutritious food crops, it follows that they can enable more efficient agriculture. Lower inputs of resources (including time) and higher output (meaning, hopefully, less hunger and lower food prices) would seem to translate to the higher availability of resources to allocate to other ventures. If communiti…
Productivity only matters for large monocultures, like soy, corn, sugar cane, where the costs are fixed and profit comes from the output - exactly the people who do not produce to feed poor people.
Poor people depend on subsistence polycultures, which don't require high productivity because they don't profit off it. On the other hand, these engineered seeds incur higher initial costs they can't afford.
People starve not because agriculture is not productive enough, but because they can't produce themselves, for a variety of reasons: the government can't ensure they keep their land (they sell for lumber/mining/monocultures, or have their land stolen outright), food production is not local (thus too expensive), lack infrastructure (most of the times, water) or simply lack knowledge on better ways to irrigate, fertilize and handle the soil. GMOs don't solve any of those problems, they just reduce even further the amount of people who can produce themselves.
Highly nutritive crops is another BS. People just need access to a large variety of food (polyculture) to maintain health, not an engineered corn, rich in iron and full of pesticide, that costs three times as much to produce.