Anti-GMO groups maybe? I certainly hope in 50 years we have embraced their ability to improve human and environment health
Of course Monsanto et al have invested a lot of money into research that shows that GMOs are safe. That is of course not in any way proof that there is anything wrong with that research, but it definitely makes me more careful in interpreting the results.
There is nothing inherently dangerous about doing this, and it has the potential to do a lot of good for humanity. It's important not to conflate the demagoguing of massive agricorps with a useful scientific technique.
The bigger scam is that, despite producing more calories than we could possibly use, they've continued modifying crops for calorie yield and chemical resistance, which has made a lot of crops less nutritious (per kg eaten), less tasty, and more dependent on advanced human intervention to successfully grow.
I’m not that worried, but I’m not that fast to exclude the possible that something goes dangerously wrong somewhere, say some crop with new genes that make it spread uncontrollable through a whole ecosystem, in the same way invasive species sometimes do.
And then of course the issues you bring up in your last paragraph. The technique is in general not used to help humankind or the world, but to maximise revenue for the corporations. At least in the industrialised world, it is now more important to increase biodiversity than to maximise yield.
You don't need to worry about GMOs for that. We already have Kudzu vines.
How about checking the research papers cited in Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_cont...
Point being, there is money to be made on both sides.
I honestly never understood the objection to GMO. Identifying the gene that some plants have to resist disease & turning it off never struck me as any more inherently risky than the end result of a multi-generational cultivation process that ultimately selects for the same or similar variations.
At any rate, I'm not convinced it's so much a lobbying problem than appealing to a questionable public sentiment. How much of that sentiment is driven by profit and how much of it is driven by more mundane misconception is hard to tell (for me).
Edit:
> Big chemical and agtech
Not necessarily. Some GMO strains require less chemicals and make some of the tech redundant.
One trivial example is that Google, one of the richest company in the world, has been trying to build housing in its home town of Mountain View for 20 years. Last I heard, nothing had happened.
Don't prohibit GMO, just invalidate the patents and regulate the results. If everyone can select the seeds that are designed best downstream farmers and consumers benefit from the reduction of monopoly.
Literally the entire current farming industry. Especially the high markup “organic” segment.
Major economics changes in any industry entirely wipe out lots of participants. Investments in certain types of equipment no longer make sense, farms in particular areas stop making sense, etc.
The environmental and health impacts of new GMOs should be studied and regulated, but this "don't eat frakenfood" rhetoric or "No GMO" labeling aught to disappear as (as you've mentioned) it can be a huge win for hunger concerns.
> "We found that ties between researchers and the GM crop industry were common, with 40 percent of the articles considered displaying conflicts of interest," said the study.
> Researchers also found that studies that had a conflict of interest were far more likely to be favorable to GM crop companies than studies that were free of financial interference.
> Conflicts of interest were defined as studies in which at least one author declared an affiliation to one of the biotech or seed companies, or received funding or payment from them