GMO offers a lot of hope for providing safe and healthy food to feed expanding populations, it's also mostly being controlled by a group of corporate stakeholders that put profits before the environment and consumer safety. In an ideal world GMO would be used in a way that is a boon for the environment, health and nutrition, food security and safety, but at this point I don't think it's mostly a profit game with societal benefit as mixed bag.

I wouldn't say hope -- GMOs have already done this. They don't offer hope, they offer a cheap, non-starvation reality. However, you're right that it's a mixed bag; you take the nutrition and efficiency with potentially detrimental effects to the socio-economic status of farmers. Jury's still out on that, perhaps literally.

There are also negative genetic possibilities, but I would remind detractors who think the industry is going too fast that people die of starvation every single minute. Everything's a profit game. Eradicating disease in Africa is (sadly) a profit game. The trick is making sure the profits come with benefits, and they already have.

EDIT: one more thing -- criticisms of Monsanto shouldn't be mixed up as criticisms of genetically-modified foods, but they always end up being so. This is due to public ignorance, the bane of our country, and has no factual basis.

EDIT2: it certainly doesn't help that Monsanto is or has been in the past engaged in two somewhat different lines of work -- the questionable chemicals side and the food modification side. Monsanto has pioneered a lot of technologies, and I guarantee you the average protester knows about maybe a tenth of them.