While that is true, the precautionary principle is also not followed in any other process. It can't be, because the precautionary principle is nothing more than the statement "never do anything, not under any circumstances".
This is why people only apply PP to things they don't want done.
It's worse than that; the precautionary principle will tell you that you can't do [whatever it is], because there might be risks, and it will also tell you that you can't refrain from doing [whatever it is], because there might be risks to that too. It is completely logically incoherent, an intellectual embarrassment.
The only thing that determines what the precautionary principle will tell you to do is what question you choose to ask.
This kind of GMO is literally (not figuratively!) life-saving technology.
Just like the Haber process enabled fertilizer to be produced cheaply, saving billions of lives. Without it, India would have faced mass-starvation and its population would be half of what it is now.
Now, you may wish to argue that the World has become overpopulated as a consequence, but then the question becomes: How would you reduce the population?
Most people would prefer to elevate societies through sufficient sustenance, comprehensive health-care, and stable governments. This seems to reliably result in negative or zero population growth.
Your view seems to be that it's preferable to starve hundreds of millions to death, leaving the survivors in abject poverty to avoid... what... "meddling with nature"?
Let the hundreds of millions eat what they will; any problems or mistakes with gene-edits that lead to poisoning, carcinogens or insidious malnutrition will be sorted out after a few decades, I'm sure. I just don't want to be the guinea pig, if I can let a hundred million other people do so instead!
Those hordes of hungry mouths are a great laboratory: diverse, far enough away and poor enough they can't take revenge on you if you accidentally poison them, etc.
> Those hordes of hungry mouths are a great laboratory
Is this sarcasm/satire?
Is it not true? I suppose not; they are a laboratory, but not a very good one.