Why would a pesticide company make GMO "foods"?
Why would a laptop company start making phones? Or a movie company start building hotels?
To expand their markets, and make more money.
i was gonna say, so all famrers start to use even more pesticides.
A company like Monsanto sells a farmer the whole package, that's why.
The original rationale behind the development of GMO was to have herbicide-resistant crops. Why is that? So, according to the brochure, you could apply pesticide directly to the fields and by eliminating weeds (which compete for nutrients and are often able to "overpower" crops) you could get a better yield.
Monsanto made a a killing by selling "Roundup-Ready" wheat seeds. Roundup is an extremely effective herbicide (like all Glycoside-based products) but the big downside is it will affect all plants. By selling corn seeds that promised to be Glycoside-resistant Monsanto had a huge potential market at their feet.
Of course what Monsanto & co didn't tell on their sleek brochures is not only GMO crops often fail to deliver the goods (for example GMO cotton is much inferior to the drought-resistant cultivars developed in India and GMO maize, despite promises to the contrary, is extremely vulnerable to the Western corn rootworm like traditional varieties) but is that, since the seeds are copyrighted, the farmer is pretty much tied hands and feet to them. You liked our Roundup-Ready products? We have a new one on the way: it's also resistant to a few of the more dangerous pests. What, you say we are overcharging and won't buy from us ever again? Tough luck buddy, we have plenty more desperate farmers willing to buy our products. With agriculture in a mess we have no shortage of desperate people.
Also, the conspiracy theory is that the ultimate goal is to have soil that only patented GMO seeds could grow in, thus literally having a monopoly on the world's food supply.
It's kind of like in the movies where they develop a super deadly virus that is essentially unstoppable, and developing the cure at the same time, so that once the villian releases the virus and it starts doing damage, everyone has to pay whatever he wants to get the cure. I believe there was a Bond film with this premise.
But here's the documentary that presents the soil angle:
They are not pesticide companies they are biotech corporations. The business of biotech corporations is synthetic chemicals for use in various applications.
That's going a bit too far. There's no need for a sinister conspirancy here.
The big problem with agriculture is government intervention. It has foistered distortions the likes of which Monsanto, BASF etc can only dream about.
Have you ever heard of the Common Agricultural Politics (CAP)? CAP is how the EU runs the whole food production in the Continent (only Switzerland and Norway are completely excluded). It's a shape of the kind of planned economy the bureaucrats in Brussels want to force over the entire Continent. They decide everything: how many tons of milk, oranges, wheat etc each member State can produce. They decide how long the fishing season is. By using fines and incentives they subsidize one State over another or one production over another. Did you know a rancher has to purchase a "milk quota" at the beginning of the year and if he exceeds that quota he has to either throw the milk away or pay a heavy fine? Did you know French fishermen are paid to sit idle many months a year to drive the price of fish up? Did you know, despite pledges to the contrary, ethanol fuel is now being introduced in many European countries as well? Did you know the price of milk is not decided by demand and supply but by committee? I am sure in wherever Stalin is right now he's nodding and smiling.