> Isn't GMO to create foods that require less pesticides?
That depends entirely on the kind of GMO. GMOs don't exist for any particular single purpose. Some GMOs exist to make it easier to use pesticides. Some GMOs contain pesticides.
Some GMOs have nothing to do with pesticides but add nutritional value. For example, Golden Rice, which has beta-carotene added to increase the vitamin-A intake of the hundreds of millions of people who subsist mainly on rice, generally gets mentioned as the one GMO that's completely positive with no discernible downside: it doesn't mess with ecosystems in any way, beta-carotene is already common in many plants, it doesn't do anything pesticide-related, and it makes people healthier.
Golden Rice is cool. And it's "nice" that the intellectual property owner has relaxed royalties for now. But it will be interesting to see how fast ancient local strains of rice disappear and there is less biodiversity. How hard is it to mix in a few greens with rice to get vitamin A?
As far as I understand, it doesn't have any kind of boosted resistance or anything, so it shouldn't dominate and replace wild rice the way other modified rice might.
That said, if farmers move from producing a wide variety of rice strains to only golden rice, that's still a significant reduction in biodiversity. Maybe they should make beta-carotene versions of more kinds of rice.
Mixing in a few greens is surprisingly hard when people are almost too poor to buy rice.
Biodiversity, I think is the biggest problem. The potato blight spread so rampently because mostly one clone of the exact potato was being grown everywhere. Some sort of rice or corn blight would be catastrophic.
Absolutely true. Also consider the fate of the Gros Michel banana. Biodiversity is vital for our food production, and GMOs definitely carry the risk of creating monocultures.
That depends entirely on the kind of GMO. GMOs don't exist for any particular single purpose. Some GMOs exist to make it easier to use pesticides. Some GMOs contain pesticides.
Some GMOs have nothing to do with pesticides but add nutritional value. For example, Golden Rice, which has beta-carotene added to increase the vitamin-A intake of the hundreds of millions of people who subsist mainly on rice, generally gets mentioned as the one GMO that's completely positive with no discernible downside: it doesn't mess with ecosystems in any way, beta-carotene is already common in many plants, it doesn't do anything pesticide-related, and it makes people healthier.