To those who make their living growing food, or the plants and animals from which processed foods are made, the benefits of biotechnology are obvious.
Biotechnology offers the potential to produce more food using fewer inputs and less land.
It offers the opportunity to minimize crop losses caused by pests. Biotechnology represents the potential to improve the nutritional quality of food. And it provides a means of controlling weeds, using more environmentally benign herbicides, through the incorporation of new 'herbicide resistant' genes into crop varieties. But this is not really new. Hybrid corn and artificial insemination of livestock are early examples.