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Monsanto creates GMOs based on nothing but greed - they have complete disregard for the environmental impact of the wanton use of pesticides that their resistant strains encourage. But that's just one GMO application - other crops use genetic modification to produce greater yields or better nutritional value.
Golden rice is a great GMO that can bring vitamin C and other essential nutrients to previously-deficient areas of the world, but it keeps getting delayed and disrupted by people who think that the reason Monsanto is terrible is because they make GMO's, rather than their sketchy business and science practices they use. GMO's as a whole are neutral, and there are amazing benefits we can get from them if we understand the difference between good and bad use of genetic modification.
OP's post points out that beneficial old-fashioned GMO creation through use of selective breeding has immensely improved agricultural yield from the original source - the process of using our own observations to modify organisms on a genetic level is not new, and without it, we wouldn't be where we are now as a species.
The origin of GMOs trace directly back to Shiro Ishii and Unit 731 (Imperial Japan's war crime squad). They did a bunch of other weird shit besides poisoning people. Particularly, they developed dawrf species of wheat so they could soak up a shit ton of chem fertilizers without getting too tall and falling over. This is the genesis of modern GMOs, and if we didn't Papercliptm Ishii, things would be very different right now.
GMO's trace back further than that - even when we're specifically talking about modern methods. The first Drosophila melanogaster fruit fly genetics experiments happened in 1910, though it took a while for us to begin actually creating GMO strains; the first study I know of that did so was in 1927 by Hermann J. Muller, using x-rays to purposefully induce mutations. But ultimately, it doesn't matter who was the first to purposefully modify the genetics of an organism, modern or otherwise.
The fact of the matter is that we can use, have used, and should use genetic modification for beneficial purposes. Again, GMO's are neutral; it just means an organism was purposefully modified on a genetic level by humans - it's the purpose itself that determines whether its good or bad. People will use it for bad reasons just like any technology, and we should stop them, but that doesn't mean we should shun the technology itself when genetic modifications have been used beneficially for millennia, and modern techniques are just as capable of producing incredibly beneficial changes as they are the detrimental ones everyone's scared of.