By 2050, the world will have to feed 9 billion people, adapt to climate change, reduce agricultural pollution and protect fresh water supplies – all at the same time. Given that formidable challenge, what are the quickest, most cost-effective ways to develop more productive, drought-, flood- and pest-resistant crops?
Some will claim that genetically engineered, or GE, crops are the solution. But when compared side-by-side, classical plant breeding bests genetic engineering. Coupled with ecologically based management methods that reduce the environmental harm of crop production, classical breeding could go a long way toward producing the food we will need by mid-century.
Read the rest (thanks to Brenda Comfort):
http://www.cornucopia.org/2011/08/classic-crop-breeding-outperforms-genetic-engineering/
“The limited nature of organic change has been common knowledge along farmers and breeders for centuries. You can breed for faster horses or larger apples, but eventually you reach a boundary that cannot be crossed, no matter how intensively you continue the breeding program. A horse will never be as fast as a cheetah, or an apple as large as a pumpkin. What’s more, as you approach the boundary, organisms become progressively weaker and more prone to disease, until eventually they become sterile and die out. This has been the bane of breeding efforts since the dawn of time. Luther Burbank, possibly the most famous breeder of all times, suggested that there might even be a natural law that ‘keeps all living things within some more or less fixed limitations.’”
So wrote Nancy Pearcey in Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, a passage that comes to mind reading your post.