The anti-GMO movement is full of pseudoscience, morons, and alterior motives, which just creates all the better target for articles like the Slate one to take down. I will stop short of saying the create a strawman, because those really are claims people make that need refuting, but they aren't addressing the entire angle of where GMO crops fit in to modern agriculture and how they are being implemented.
Google Neonicotinoid and GMO for some articles - the use of chemicals and GM crops aren't inherently related, you can use neonics and other insecticides with non GMO crops, and you can grow GMO without the insecticide. But the companies that have been selling GMO seeds are selling this model where farmers don't need to do IPM, just prophylatic fungicides, insecticides, and herbicides (that the GM crops are resistant to). The use of some of these things are not necessary to grow a lot of corn, but this model of agriculture promotes increased use sometimes to all around detriment.
For example a study recently found the use of insecticides has only REDUCED yields - it kills predators of slugs which then increase in number and cause crop damage, but their use has been sold to farmers for years now as a new necessity.
http://www.chemservice.com/news/2015/03/study-insecticides-can-increase-slug-damage-to-crops-2/
In some utopian implementation, GMOs could improve everything. In practice, there are drawbacks, sometimes unexpected, and especially because someone has something to sell. It really needs to be weighed case by case and I think some precaution is perfectly acceptable, for example in the case of companies pushing corn farmers away from the IPM model that had worked just fine.
I liked this part of the Slate article:
So while most of the anti-GMO crowd is full of shit, the pro-GMO crowd that is 100% for GM technology without any nuanced consideration can be full of shit too, because the technology isn't an idealized solution to every problem, their implementation is messier and more complex.
