In an article today on Truth About Trade & Technology, Chairman Dean Kleckner criticizes former UN chief Kofi Annan for his rejection of the use of GMO crops by his organization the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

According to Kleckner:

What African farmers need more than anything else, however, are better seeds…In the 21st century, that means unfettered access to GM seeds while continuing to work with old technologies.

Kleckner continues:

The biotech option, without question, has helped farmers all over the world–so much so, in fact, that they’ve planted and harvested well over one and a half billion acres of GM crops.

But a more serious analysis of the GM situation reveals a much more nuanced and, to say the least, ambiguous portrait of GM adoption around the world. I don’t know why Dean Kleckner is so sanguine in his advocacy for GM crops. For my part, aside from the dubious track record of GM crops in the field, there are a number of reasons why focusing our attention on genetic modification is misguided.

First, we have barely scratched the surface of naturally occurring genetic variability within the genotypes of our existing crop resources. Numerous studies indicate the inevitable decline in biodiversity with the adoption of “modern” agricultural practices. As this agricultural biodiversity declines, we lose access to hundreds, even thousands of varieties with resistance to pests, drought, and cold.

Along these lines, it is important to keep in mind that genetic engineering is an extremely new technology, especially when we contrast it with an agrarian tradition of selective breeding that goes back millenia. Agricultural biodiversity, much like the many languages of the world, is our global heritage.

Genetic engineering is more than a technophilic distraction from the real work that lays ahead of us; it presents a significant risk of contaminating our ancient strains of rice, corn, soy, cotton and others with foreign genes, in some cases biologically suicidal genes (e.g. “terminator”).

Paul Stamets notes, quite astutely, that he has found ways to combat diesel contamination in soil, small pox viruses, and carpenter ant infestations by putting to best use the highly evolved and diverse nature of mushroom mycelium. And he is quick to point out that he has not had to resort to genetic modification, but has merely opened his mind and practice to the incomprehensible diversity of the natural world.

I am not against the development of Africa. From my perspective, I believe in economic development more than Kleckner or Annan. And I will be the first advocate for genetic engineering once we have effectively and demonstrably exhausted all of the possible agro-ecological configurations that natural selection and traditional breeding have to offer. Given our limited imaginations, and considering that pioneers like Stamets and Mollison have admittedly only just scratched the surface in the realm of possibility, it is safe to say that the need for genetic engineering is centuries, if not millenia, into the future. By then, if we make it that far, it is quite possible that our mindful approach towards the natural world may have taught us the wisdom of using what nature has to give.