Sure you can, though only probabilistically. That's precisely why fiddling with something as critical as the food supply is a bad idea, as it's likely we'll only discover potential problems when it's too late.
That paper is so bad, it's not even wrong. It's just clever word-trickery by someone who is quite skilled in writing in an authoritative and scholarly tone.
He does have the courtesy to recognize that his thinking goes against the scientific method:
"While evidentiary approaches are often considered to
reflect adherence to the scientific method in its purest
form"
But then he just declares that his principle is superior to the scientific method:
"In the case of ruin, by the time evidence comes it will by definition be too late to avoid it."
He knows nothing about biology or argiculture:
"The ecological implications of releasing modified organisms into the wild are not tested empirically before release."
(In reality, crop plants don't survive in the wild even if you release them. No more than farm animals would.)
But then in section 12.8 he goes on to explain why he actually knows better than people who actually have domain expertise in the relevant sciences. It is a crafty tactic: He almost manages to convince you that you shouldn't listen to experts, and then he cites that there is a historical track record of experts having been wrong in their subject domains. And that you should listen to outsiders like him.