They are not treating genetic manipulation as somehow a superior food production system. I think it is absolutely key to not forget that the roots of genetic engineering are in eugenics and as genetic engineering moves from agriculture to human manipulation we are going to be right back with a very vicious eugenics program. All we're doing is speeding up the process . First of all, when farmers have been selecting they have been selecting between two boundaries and limits that they set for themselves. The first is the ecosystem limit.
Farmers select crops according to the ecosystems in which they produce.
No farmer in the world has done seed selection sitting in tropical Africa and trying to grow crops in temperate Sweden. Africans have bred crops for Africa, and Swedish farmers have evolved crops for Sweden. The second is related to the fact that they have always worked within the limits set by intra-species breeding. You only work with rice to evolve new rice plants. You work with wheat to evolve new wheat plants.