The Other Perspective on GMO's

I am currently reading a book recommended by Jordan B. Peterson titled, Progress: Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future. It is written by Johan Norberg and first published in 2016. 

I highly recommend reading this book for a perspective that is entirely missing today.

Here is an excerpt:

"It has been estimated that in the first decade of the twentieth century, 3.1 million children died annually because of conditions related to malnutrition. This increased to about four million children in the 1950s and 1960s because of population growth, but then it started to decline rapidly, even in absolute numbers. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, 1.7 million children died because of malnutrition--still a shockingly high number, but a sixty per cent reduction since the 1950s, even though world population more than doubled.
There have been negative side effects of this more intensive farming, including over-extraction of groundwater for irrigation and nitrate pollution of water bodies. But the Green Revolution also made it possible to save pristine land from being turned into farmland. Between 1700 and 1960, farmland quadrupled, as people made use of forests and grassland to feed themselves. But after fixing nitrogen and developing new seeds, it was possible to produce more from the same amount of land. For the first time, for the world as a whole, food production has been decoupled from land use.
From 1961 to 2009, farmland increased by only twelve per cent, while farm production increased by about 300%. It has been estimated that, had agricultural yields stayed the same, farmers would have needed to turn another three billion hectares into farmland--immense continental areas, about the size of the USA, Canada and China put together. Artificial fertilizer has caused oxygen depletion in many marine systems, but it also saved us from depleting wildlife and turning our planet into 'Skinhead Earth.'
In 1970, Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in increasing the global food supply. As US Senator Rudy Boschwitz put it:

'Dr. Norman Borlaug is the first person in history to save a billion human lives. But he must also get credit for saving the wild creatures and diverse plant species on 12 million square miles of global forest that would long since have been ploughed down without the high-yield farming he pioneered. The two accomplishments combined make him dramatically unique.'

Nonetheless arguments against modern agricultural technology have had a huge impact on the debate, and some environmentalists object to nitrogen fertilizer on principle, despite the human cost. Today we see the same objections to genetically modified crops, which would increase our yields even further. Environmental campaigners have had an impact on one continent, Africa, where they pressured big foundations and the World Bank to back away from introducing the Green Revolution, which Borlaug had considered the next priority. This is now the only region where the number of undernourished people has continued to increase, and where wild habitats are being depleted by slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture.
Borlaug has reacted angrily to this campaign:

'Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.'" From the book, Progress