While GMOs are not harmful and banning them is overall bad, they don't have nearly the same magnitude of impact on agricultural productivity as herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.
While GMOs are not harmful and banning them is overall bad, they don't have nearly the same magnitude of impact on agricultural productivity as herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers.
You also have things like Golden Rice, which help people who have vitamin A deficiencies and don't have access to vitamin A sources to be able to get vitamin A. Vitamin A deficiencies kill almost a million children under 5 each year especially in South-East Asia. It is only practical to solve this problem through GMOs. (Greenpeace also protested Golden Rice, meaning they protested against programs that can save tens of millions of children. Whether or not you hold that against them is up to you, but if they want to play the "blood on your hands" game I don't see why I shouldn't.)
To be clear; pesticides, herbicides, and fertilisers are very important to agriculture and many more people would be starving without them. But the same is true of GMOs -- they are more than just "not harmful"; they are necessary.
It is a different technique, but the purpose is the same. [1] gives a good overview over why discriminating between the "more natural" genetic modification techniques and the "less natural" ones is not a reasonable middle-ground. Healthy skepticism around particular GMOs (meaning particular plants) is completely fine (and should be encouraged -- like all skepticism), but skepticism around all plants produced by a given group of techniques doesn't make much sense imo.
Regarding proprietary pesticides, there is a legitimate issue there (as there is with the patenting of biotech -- or patents in general) but it has been hijacked by anti-GMO protests making claims that farmers were sued because of cross-contamination from other farms and similarly false statements.
As I understand it, a big part of the green revolution, especially initially, was Borlaug developing a strand of wheat that was resistant to many common diseases and had higher yields. This seems born out by a quick skim of his [wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug), although I'm sure nitrogen fertilizer, etc, also played large roles.
I don't have the time to do a deep dive right now, so I've just updated my previous comment to be uncertain.
But my point is actually that modern GMO plants, the Monsanto ones that people are currently freaking out about, don't revolutionize yields. They improve them on the margin, but it's not another green revolution, at least so far.