However this doesn’t really take away from my point that GMO didn’t fix world hunger. Farmers can save money by using less pesticide and have better crop yield all they want but that still doesn’t fix food not going to where it is needed.

This—on its own—doesn’t even take away from my weaker claim that „I doubt GMO has raised the standard of living for the average person“. Sure it has raised the standard of living for the farmers that have the option of swapping to GMO crops that previously needed a lot of pesticide. But unless you believe in some trickle down economic theory that will not automatically raise the standard of living to anyone else.

That all said I do find it a little handy that the quoted study only talks about maize, soy, and cotton. One of these is not even a food crop. And the two food crops here are notorious for giant industrial scale farms where much of the yield isn’t even for human consumption, but turned into feed for the meat industry. See it’s a problem of distribution. The profits of more maize and soy yield grown with less pesticide will most likely stay with the farmer, and even if they reduce the price of their price product, the profit from the cheaper crops will more likely go to the cattle farmer up stream with the cheaper feed. The standard of living for the average person will just remain the same, or—at best—marginally improve.