Before you reply remember random mutation is common - normal in nature. what is the difference between a random mutation and one a scientist comes up with. So far the only one I've found is random mutation isn't studied for safety.
The real reason, however, are the political and economical implications of GMOs. Sure, they say they'll use them to fight famine. But in reality, they'll just try to extract as much profit as they can, regardless of the interests of the people growing the plants and eating the food. We've seen farmers get sued (see Bowman v Monsanto) and other evil stuff like that.
I don't understand why you are fighting against GMO. Not all GMO is done by corporations. Golden rice for example was not done by a big corporation.
The article briefly mentions that initially some seeds are given with royalty free licenses, but for how long?
2. If you get a productivity boost from GMO, and but then GMO company goes rogue, can't you still go back to planting regular seeds?
If you have core dependency goes rogue, and you have to switch to an alternate library with similar features, is that a free switch? Think of how many thousands of hours of work are often needed? How many businesses have gone under because of such issues?
Growing a particular variety requires a lot of knowledge gained by each individual farmer from experience. You can't just go back to an old variety for free. It may take several years for yields to go back to previous levels and by then the farmer may have gone under.
Countries can and do ban closed source paid products when they don't trust the provider (e.g. Huawei)
When a GMO goes rogue you can just buy a different seed the next planting season, which you were going to do anyway.
even ignoring that things the patents were easy for golden rice to license. https://www.goldenrice.org/Content2-How/how9_IP.php
But, supposing there are rigorous tests and only well understood, small alterations are permitted, there is the second reason: economics. E.g. what will a country do when a GMO seed company starts taking over farms?
Like store-brand products in supermarkets, such company farms have a competitive advantage in that they can get seeds cheaper, so it could happen they slowly take over all farming. And even independent farms would be in the precarious position of depending on a small handful of global companies for their seeds. If they don't comply with the demands of these seed companies, they'd go out of business, unable to compete. Yes there are seed companies already, but the barrier to entry, degree of consolidation, and advantage gained by doing business with them, is less than when you need genetic engineering to stay in the race, so the risk of such sovereignty-wrecking monopolies is much greater with GM seeds.
And third, the health reason (distinct from safety). When companies are allowed to engineer food as they want, we get Snickers bars and Coca Cola. Do we want to unleash these same corporate practices on plants themselves? Why do we believe business pressures will get us only things like drought-resistant and vitamin-enriched rice, and not some rice variant that sacrifices nutrients to increase yield or taste? Currently, the healthiest foods are those with the least corporate engineering. What reason is there to believe this will change with GMOs?
This is 100% false. Random genetic change happens often across the billions of seeds planted every year. GMO is a much much smaller amount of change that targets a very tiny section of DNA.
> what will a country do when a GMO seed company starts taking over farms?
That is unrelated to GMO. Seed companies existed for many decades before GMO. There is a reason they have not taken over: the economics of running a large farm do not pay - they still need employees at each farm to learn the field and make decision on what works - soil is not 100% uniform and often farmers plant different seeds in the same field (that is 4 different corn seeds depending on the soil- the low areas get a variety that handles wet conditions better, while the high areas need to handle drought. Then there is the sand/clay mix... And that is a very high level overview, you can get a phd in soil if you want details). Someone needs to make decisions about what fertilizer to use. Someone needs to take the risk of good/bad weather, tariffs, and all the other things farmers do. There is a lot of value to seed companies in not having to worry about that.
> Like store-brand products in supermarkets, such company farms have a competitive advantage in that they can get seeds cheaper, so it could happen they slowly take over all farming.
This is a competitive disadvantage. A seed company doesn't make the best seed for all situations, so if they end up with a farm where their competitors seeds are better they are losing value putting their own seeds in their fields - seeds that they cannot then sell to a different field where they would do better. Remember from above planting 4 different seeds in a field is not uncommon - 1 of those might be from a different company.
> the health reason
Has nothing to do with GMO.
Yet in all the billions of mice born every year, not one was born luminescent [1]. Peddle your lies somewhere else.
> There is a lot of value to seed companies in not having to worry about that.
Yet many companies vertically integrate, and get a competitive edge. You think soil and weather diversity is an unassailable moat?
> That is unrelated to GMO.
I explicitly explained how it is related to GMO.
> This is a competitive disadvantage. A seed company doesn't make the best seed for all situations
Can still buy from other seed companies, same as any other farmer. But they get a discount on their own seeds, unlike other farmers.
> Has nothing to do with GMO.
I explained how GMO enables it.
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/02/glowing-mice-sugge...
That is random chance. There is no reason to think it won't happen next year. A statistician can calculate the odds - but remember that the odds are the same for every other random mutation - yet many of them happen. (many many more will not)