You are in Candyland. GMO will be the beginning of a long, miserable decline.
If we are lucky.

Issues of GMO intellectual property and genetic degradation are debatable. The issue of a short-term production increase potentially leading to long-term production decrease should be more closely examined before proceeding with caution. Extinction is not something that can be rolled back.

There is a huge farmer to consumer GMO awareness chasm that has been purposely cultivated by the likes of Monsanto. Farmers have been and are the primary point of sale and have been promised all kinds of wonderful benefits….and have been told “Oh, and the GMO stuff is the same as normal food so your customer won’t even know the difference.” On the other hand, consumers have been totally kept in the dark since GMOs were introduced. Complicating matters, Monsanto’s own GMO propaganda is an absolute mess of marketing chicanery and circular logic traps. Their claims rest on an argument of substantial equivalence of GMOs to normal food. Since no human health testing is done on normal foods, therefore no testing is required for GMOs. In fact, there’s not a single human health clinical feeding study that’s ever been released showing GMOs are safe.

So, to this stories premise of proceed with caution, I summarily dismiss it as false. The Big Ag biotech industry has proceeded by abandon and placed every eater at-risk. The caution is ours to awaken to the imbalances in how our regulators side with and work with corporations to facilitate moving their products to market, not to test them or take a precautionary approach. We are an active on-going human experiment in the public GMO laboratory which I deeply resent. I was not consulted. Nobody asked my permission. Everyone is being taken advantage of. Caution, indeed! Every eater should be wary of the those promising that GMOs will feed the world while hiding the fact that most Americans are unknowingly ingesting GMOs complete with a heaping dose of pesticide in every bite. Like everything, you have to read the fine print and in-between the lines of all the corporate boasts (feeding the world).

“We are seeing glyphosate-resistant weeds and Bt-resistant bugs.”

I would add that beyond potential resistance of weeds, the very plants that are engineered to be resistant are potentially hazardous weeds. For example, if a “Roundup Ready” plant becomes a weed itself, it can cause significant damage to areas treated with glycophosphate.

“2-4-D is an ingredient in Agent Orange”

While 2,4-D is technically an ingredient in Agent Orange, this is a misleading statement given the harsh effects of Agent Orange’s dioxin contamination during the Vietnam War. Propaganda which associates 2,4-D with Agent Orange detracts from a serious discussion about the use of 2,4-D.

My personal “fear” about GM crops are the associated genetic patents and potential loss of germplasm diversity in seed banks.

To genetically engineer a plant, the most common method today involves extracting a gene from another plant or animal and using that gene to genetically modify a virus. This virus is then used to infect the target plant in order to deliver the desired gene.

We already know of monoculture does not work. Nature is in a constant state of evolution. We are seeing glyphosate-resistant weeds and Bt-resistant bugs. So now they are upping the strength of the herbicide and they want to roll out plants that are 2-4-D resistant. 2-4-D is an ingredient in Agent Orange. What happens when weeds become resistant to that? Do you see where this is going?