GMOs are a huge step forward in bioscience. This path will eventually allow us to grow crop in areas where we once couldn’t due to harsh alttitudes or climates.
Cross-breeding is a natural process, GMOs are simply the lab version of cross-breeding. Much like how hydrogen gas is naturally occurring, it can also be made in a lab.
Often, people will associate GMOs directly with Monsanto because they are the big player in the game. While I don’t like some of their business practices, all they have really done is capitalize the farming market. It’s not like they are spreding lies about GMOs or actually doing anything any more harmful than traditional or organic farming practices. They’ve simply made their crop more resilient to their pesticide, allowing for a healthier crop cycle.
I think peoples main fear with Monsanto is that their seeds are also modified to prevent reproduction of their “patented” modified genes. In other words, after the first harvest of their crop, the new seeds produced in that harvest revert back to the original, non-modified, gene. Forcing farmers to rebuy their seeds from Monsanto in order to continue with their easy “plant it, and forget it” farming lifestyle. The fear is that these modified seeds would inadvertently cross breed with normal crop and somehow create this mutated seed that doesn’t reproduce at all, destroying all plant life. Which is a pretty far fetched concern.
Most of the anti-gmo propaganda is flowing out from big players in the $26 billion/year organic foods industry. They tend to make some pretty radical claims, but if you follow all of their information to the source articles, you’ll find a lot of bogus tests that don’t even hold up in the global scientific community.