{"id":640,"date":"2010-02-13T22:33:26","date_gmt":"2010-02-13T09:33:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2010\/02\/armed_and_dangerous\/"},"modified":"2010-02-13T22:33:26","modified_gmt":"2010-02-13T09:33:26","slug":"armed-and-dangerous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2010\/02\/armed-and-dangerous\/","title":{"rendered":"armed and dangerous…"},"content":{"rendered":"

… the intriguing title of a brief news item in the latest edition of Science<\/i><\/a>. The story (anon, 2010) outlines some of the most serious plant & fungal threats to agricultural production. One of them is the potato blight fungus, Phytophthora infestans<\/i>. The leaves & stems of an infected plant blacken & fall, & the tubers themselves basically turn to mush:<\/p>\n

\"Potato<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I mention potato blight in my first-year lectures, when I talk about the impact of plants on human history. The organism causing potato blight is infamous for its role in the great potato famine in Ireland<\/a>, which ran from 1845 to 1851.  On a global scale it’s probably still the<\/i> most significant threat to potato crops: In developing countries P. infestans<\/em> causes crop losses worth around $US2.75 billion every year (Anon. 2010).<\/p>\n

Potatoes have been cultivated<\/a> in South America for thousands of years, and were introduced to Spain in 1570, following the Spanish conquistadores’ arrival in Peru. The humble spud slowly spread through the fields & gardens of Europe & reached Ireland by the 1600s. Perhaps surprisingly, potatoes were often greeted with suspicion; Russian peasants, for example, viewed them as sent by the devil. It took a while for the idea of actually eating them, rather than tearing them up or feeding them to animals, to sink in.<\/p>\n

Once this had happened, food production increased & this in turn meant that human populations also began to rise. This can be seen to greatest effect in Ireland: between 1780 & 1841 the Irish population went from 4 to 8 million people, based almost entirely on the widespread cultivation & consumption of the humble spud, which with milk or water was the dietary staple<\/a> of most Irish peasants. Apparently a working man might eat 5-6kg of potatoes a day<\/i><\/a>. (This should all be put in its social context, which you can read about here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Phytophthera infestans<\/i> apparently arrived in Ireland in September 1845, blown across from fields in England, or in ships from the American colonies. The Irish potato crop failed in a matter of weeks, leading to widespread famine among the peasantry. (The UK wasn’t affected as badly because people were not so heavily reliant on a single food crop.) Unbelievably, at the same time as people were starving, Irish cereal crops (wheat, barley & oats) were being exported<\/a> to England…<\/p>\n

With nothing else to eat (the price of cereals was out of the reach of your average peasant, & efforts by the British government to supply corn at the beginning of the famine were fairly ineffective), people turned to eating turnips, weeds, seaweed, even grass<\/a>. Death rates soared, although at least as many people died of infectious diseases (typhus, disentery etc) as from starvation. Understandably, many peasant farmers could no longer pay their rent, & there were wholesale evictions; many of those who were turned off the land ended up being transshipped to Canada & the US<\/a>. Eyewitness accounts<\/a> of the time make harrowing reading. The combination of migration and deaths due to starvation & disease saw the Irish population plummet<\/a>: somewhere between 500,000 & 1.5 million died, and more than 1,000,000 people emigrated, during & immediately after the famine. Even after it was over the population continued to fall, getting down to about 4 million by 1911.<\/p>\n

There’s a lesson for us all in the story of the Irish potato famine. Just 15 crop plants provide about 90% of the world’s food energy intake, with three of them (rice, maize & wheat) making up 2\/3 of this. These three crops are the staple foods for more than 4 billion people. And as the story in Science<\/a> shows, P.infestans <\/i>& other biological threats to our food security are still with us.<\/p>\n

Anon. (2010) Armed and dangerous. Science<\/u> 327(5967): 804-805<\/a> DOI: 10.1126\/science.327.5967.804<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… the intriguing title of a brief news item in the latest edition of Science. The story (anon, 2010) outlines some of the most serious plant & fungal threats to agricultural production. One of them is the potato blight fungus, Phytophthora infestans. The leaves & stems of an infected plant blacken & fall, & the tubers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[24,31],"yoast_head":"\narmed and dangerous... : BioBlog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.waikato.ac.nz\/bioblog\/2010\/02\/armed-and-dangerous\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"armed and dangerous... : BioBlog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"… the intriguing title of a brief news item in the latest edition of Science. The story (anon, 2010) outlines some of the most serious plant & fungal threats to agricultural production. 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