@alexey The idea that selective breeding is GMO is just some marketing nonsense for people who support GMO. Dont get me wrong I am all for GMO, but they cant be even remotely compared as the same thing.

If you inject a specific gene that you engineered in a lab that in no way resembles any gene native in the species of plant or plants it can breed with, then ability to be able to produce that same gene through natural selection would be, in many cases, virtually impossible. So impossible that even if you started breeding when the first human popped out of a chimps belly, until today, you still wouldnt have produced the injected gene or anything that comes close to it.

Moreover even if you could breed the same gene or trait into an organism, which is occasionally possible as a generality, you wind up modifying other genes in the process as the plant tries to compensate its various needs to optimize for the new trait, this often means loosing other traits of interest to us. In other words through breeding we dont have enough control to ensure we, however slowly, modify only a signle gene and preserve all the others.

In reality though breeding is 99.9% phenotype selection and only maybe once a generation you get an actual gene mutation itself, and what that mutation happens to be will be fairly random and in the overwhelming majority of times will tend to shut down some trait rather than adding a new useful trait. Naval oranges is an example of an actual gene mutation for example (not generational breeding of phenotypes but an actual mutation), and its effect was basically to destroy the plants trait of producing seeds. For us that happened to be a good mutation. But the point is not only are mutations particularly rare but in the case of resistance to pesticides or other desired traits its far more likely to result in destroying a plants resistance to something than to impart new resistance.