Organic Vanity?

I read with interest the Wall Street Journal's "Weekend Interview" with Peter Brabeck-Letmathe .  The headline of the piece is a provocative question: "Can the world still feed itself?"  Brabeck-Letmathe offers a qualified affirmative answer, and one of those qualifications is one that I know will trouble many.  I refer here to his comments on genetically modified crops:

What's harder for him to understand is that Europe's policies effectively forbid poor countries in places like Africa from using genetically modified seed. These countries, he says, urgently need the technology to increase yields and productivity in their backward agricultural sectors. But if they plant GMOs, then under Europe's rules the EU "will not allow you to export anything—anything. Not just the [crop] that has GMO—anything," because of European fears about cross-contamination and almost impossibly strict purity standards. The European fear of genetically modified crops is, he says, "purely emotional. It's becoming almost a religious belief."
This makes Mr. Brabeck-Letmathe, a jovial man with a quick smile, get emotional himself. "How many people," he asks with a touch of irritation, "have died from food contamination from organic products, and how many people have died from GMO products?" He answers his own question: "None from GMO. And I don't have to ask too long how many people have died just recently from organic," he adds, referring to the e. coli outbreak earlier this year in Europe.

I have to agree with him.  Denying impoverished peoples the opportunity to at least try using GMO crops - which are more productive per unit land area than "regular" crops and organic crops- is unconscionable.  Is it not indeed a kind of vanity to insist that those starving and dying in East Africa do without the benefit of more productive crops?