Side note before I go – have you heard of resistance to glyphosate developing in South American coca plants? What’s happening there is effectively breeding for herbicide resistance. If it can be done accidentally, couldn’t it be done on purpose? And, it has, particularly in mutagenesis screening experiments.

Far from avoiding unknown complexities, selective breeding leads to far more unknown complexities than genetic modification.

When you breed in your herbicide/disease resistance trait, by the nature of genetics you lose a random selection of beneficial disease resistance, yield, grain quality, plant height, nutrient use efficiency, photosynthetic capacity, structural, root morphology etc etc etc traits. OK by laborious selective breeding over many years you can save as many of these as possible, but thousands of contributing factors accounting for a successful variety remain unknown and will be lost.

Despite any perceived unintended side effects of GMOs (very few have actually been demonstrated) a far safer system is to genetically engineer your trait into a range of already successful and widely used crop varieties.

Contrary to popular argument, I believe that GM has the potential to increase the range of crop varieties under cultivation if accepted as a technology. A myriad of high quality varieties that have been lost over the years when they became susceptible to a new strain of disease or had too low a level of water use/nutrient uptake now have the possibility to be resurrected by genetic engineering techniques and the incorporation of traits from other varieties that would protect their ‘achilles heel’.
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Jonathan

It seems appropriate to tackle the primary impactor(s).

Also, many might think that selective breeding is a safer method to allow some consideration for unknown complexities. I don’t know if that’s accurate.