How is this a Troll? Because it goes against the groupthink?
GMO is different, it's a fundamentally different approach to breeding plants which goes way beyond breeding, and it permits outcomes which were not feasible or even possible before. That is cause for alarm. It's not reason not to experiment, of course. Science is how we progress as a species. I object to using the wide world for these experiments, not to doing the science.
This is a perfectly reasonable point of view. It is objectively true that GMO is different from traditional breeding methods. How many generations of selective breeding would it take to breed a glow-in-the dark strawberry plant? I have no idea, but I bet if you started at the dawn of agriculture you still wouldn't have one. What would you even select for? But now we can do that directly with genetic engineering, in one generation. Genetic engineering of crops is a second agricultural revolution, except with even more potential impact both to human health and the health of ecosystems.
And what effect did the first agricultural revolution have on human health? It was good, right? Not necessarily:
When populations around the globe started turning to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, regardless of their locations and type of crops, a similar trend occurred: The height and health of the people declined.
... Many people have this image of the rise of agriculture and the dawn of modern civilization, and they just assume that a more stable food source makes you healthier," Mummert says. "But early agriculturalists experienced nutritional deficiencies and had a harder time adapting to stress, probably because they became dependent on particular food crops, rather than having a more significantly diverse diet.
Sound familiar?
... "Culturally, we're agricultural chauvinists. We tend to think that producing food is always beneficial, but the picture is much more complex than that," says Emory anthropologist George Armelagos, co-author of the review. "Humans paid a heavy biological cost for agriculture, especially when it came to the variety of nutrients. Even now, about 60 percent of our calories come from corn, rice and wheat."
... "I think it's important to consider what exactly 'good health' means," Mummert says. "The modernization and commercialization of food may be helping us by providing more calories, but those calories may not be good for us. You need calories to grow bones long, but you need rich nutrients to grow bones strong."
People have become healthier because of agriculture, but not because the food is healthier--it probably isn't healthier. Rather, we've become healthier in the long run because agriculture allowed us to produce enough food to have doctors and clean water and sanitation. In the short term, agricultural food made us less healthy.
In principle, a genetically engineered food supply could be overall better, maybe even incredibly better. But in practice it isn't clear we're getting that, or even if that's what we're trying to get. Instead, we're just continuing to make food even cheaper, not necessarily healthier, with even more dependence on particular crops.
Agriculture freed enough people from the burden feeding themselves to create modern civilization. But today almost nobody is a farmer--we're just making agriculture more profitable, but at what cost? Genetic engineering so far has mostly been used to maximize crop yield over nutrition and diversity, just like we've always done.
Which is to say nothing about the potential ecological implications. "The picture is much more complex than that" is an understatement. This won't be the first time we've forged ahead with some technology completely oblivious to the ecological impacts.