Irish potato famine pathogen identified

[Eugene]

Source: BBC

21 May 2013 Last updated at 03:05 GMT

Irish potato famine pathogen identified

By Helen Briggs
BBC News

Scientists have used plant samples collected in the mid-19th Century to identify the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine.

A plant pest that causes potato blight spread to Ireland in 1845 triggering a famine that killed one million people.

DNA extracted from museum specimens shows the strain that changed history is different from modern day epidemics, and is probably now extinct.

Other strains continue to attack potato and tomato crops around the world.

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Read more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22596561

[ScreamingMeemie]

1. Now...let's just step into the TARDIS...

...

[Sanity Claws]

2. But monoculture allowed the pathogen to take over

Potatoes were planted everywhere in Ireland. This permitted the pathogen to spread easily. Had the fields held different crops, there would have been buffers that would have stopped the spread.
Monoculture planting is not good agriculture.

[siligut]

3. Yes, diversity is key to survival over the long term

Environments change.

[Warpy]

4. You can survive on a diet of nothing but potatoes

It's the only foodstuff about which you can say this. It's a boring diet but it will sustain you. It allowed the Irish population to balloon up to 8 million with no end in sight, each peasant family with its small tattie field separated by a line of rocks. They grew only one variety, the one still called the Irish cobbler potato, one that turned out to be particularly vulnerable to blight. 6 million people either died of starvation or emigrated when the potato crop failed for years in the 1840s. The infuriating part of this is that Ireland produced enough other foodstuffs to feed all 8 million but British landlords insisted the food be exported for profit.

I agree that monoculture is poor agriculture but given the tiny size of peasant plots and the fact that they were usually in the poorest soil on the steepest hillsides, it was the best they could do to survive. People who had more in life also had the luxury of enough land to plant alternative crops.

[Sanity Claws]

5. Potatoes plus dairy products made up the Irish diet

The Irish subsisted on the potatoes and dairy but my understanding is that fields were also cultivated with the potatoes, to provide fodder.
I certainly do not blame the Irish for the monoculture farming. The problem was the way the land was held and the rent that the Irish had to pay to the landlords.