A top executive at biotech giant Monsanto said he opposes a proposal by the Obama administration to consolidate the government’s disparate agriculture and food-related regulatory groups into a single agency in charge of food safety.

More than a dozen agencies now oversee some aspect of the country’s sprawling food supply chain. President Obama’s budget blueprint for fiscal 2016 calls for significantly cutting the bureaucratic overlap, a move supported by consumer safety groups and the Congressional Budget Office.

But in an interview with The Chronicle, Monsanto Chief Technology Officer Robert Fraley called the U.S. regulatory regime, led by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, the “gold standard around the world.”

Each agency contributes unique expertise to the system, he said.

Normally, it would be rare to hear an executive support a large, complicated network of overlapping agencies versus a more simple system. But then again, Monsanto has done just fine under the status quo. The company, based in suburban St. Louis, generated about $16 billion in annual sales last year, mostly on the strength of its portfolio of products that genetically enhance crops like corn and soybeans to increase yields and resist pests and diseases.

More importantly, U.S. regulators use “decision making that’s science based,” Fraley said.

The distinction is important to Fraley and Monsanto. The company has fostered the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on farms around the world since the 1990s. Consequently, Monsanto is public enemy No. 1 for critics who say such “Frankenfoods” are unsafe for consumers and bad for the environment.

As a food and agriculture reporter in St. Louis in the early 2000s, I witnessed firsthand the controversy, which has ranged from spirited debate to outright hysteria.

More than a decade later, not much has changed. Some state lawmakers want to require food manufacturers to label foods made from GMOs, though Fraley has previously expressed support for a national system to label GMO-free foods. In any case, GMOs are well established in the American food supply, and that’s unlikely to change even if Obama consolidates food regulation. No matter how wild the conspiracy theories.

For example, activists recently accused the federal government of conspiring with Monsanto to — and I’m not making this up — create the severe drought in California.

Weather mastery aside, the debate over global warming offers Monsanto some unique opportunities — and perils.

Fraley correctly notes that climate change will fundamentally alter agriculture, such as when insects hatch and where to plant crops. As the globe heats up, infertile land in cold regions like northern Canada and Russia can suddenly produce crops. At the same time, current farmland might turn to dust.

“Even if a couple of degrees in temperature goes up, it will make farming much more complex,” Fraley said.

Meanwhile, the Earth’s population will continue to grow to 9 billion by 2050, further straining the planet’s resources. Seems to me that the world needs Monsanto more than it needs to hate its technology.

In addition to GMOs that repel insects, Monsanto is developing ways to make food grow in drought conditions, something that might prove particularly useful to farmers in California. The company is pioneering advanced plant breeding, thanks to its ability to map out entire genetic sequences of crops.

“The only thing that fixes climate change is (more) plants,” Fraley said.

Two years ago, Monsanto paid $1.1 billion to acquire the Climate Corp. in San Francisco, which has developed mobile apps allowing farmers to monitor real-time information on weather and soil temperature. Such data science tools can help farmers better manage their crops during times of drought.

But people who distrust established science over climate change are also likely to continue to doubt the scientific benefits of GMOs.

Fraley, who did graduate work at UCSF, couldn’t help notice the irony. The Bay Area, which first gave birth to biotechnology and data science — the two technologies that revolutionized agriculture — is also home to a sizable population that distrusts GMOs and vaccinating children against the measles.

“I don’t see talking about GMOs is any different from talking about the science of vaccinations,” Fraley said. “We need to make people focus on science, not people’s emotions.”

Thomas Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle business columnist. E-mail: tlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByTomLee