• Question: could the potato famine happen again? has potato blight been cured?

    Asked by wookiee to Amelia, Izzy, Sarah on 19 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Sarah Harvey

      Sarah Harvey answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      Love this question as I work on potato blight!!

      I don’t think a disaster on the scale of the Irish potato famine could happen again in Ireland as they’re much less dependent on just potatoes. However crops failing around the world still happens due to a variety of factors e.g. drought and also millions of pounds of damage to crops per year is caused by potato blight alone!

      In answer to whether it’s been cured well it has and hasn’t. There are varieties of potato which are blight resistant however usually it is only a matter of time before this resistance fails (usually as short as a few years!). So we’re trying to work now on ‘durable’ resistance which isn’t down to just one resistance gene which is bred into the potatoes, but this is complicated as we need to understand exactly how the infection happens and how the plant defends itself in order to make them more resistant.

    • Photo: Amelia Frizell-Armitage

      Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      The reason potato blight caused such a big famine in Ireland is because the people in Ireland at the time were completely dependent on potatoes. As soon as one potato crop got infected, the blight spread quickly to nearby crops and destroyed most of Ireland’s potatoes. There was not enough else to eat, as potatoes were their main source of food, so people starved and died.

      We learnt from this, and now most countries try not to be dependant on only one type of crop. All crops have diseases they can catch, for example leaf rust in wheat can kill up to 50% of a farmer’s wheat crop! If we make sure we have more than one type of food that we eat, even if all the wheat in the UK got rust and died, or all the potatoes got blight again, we wouldn’t starve as there are lots of other types of food we can eat.

    • Photo: Isabel Webb

      Isabel Webb answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      Potato blight is caused by a fungus-like organism called an oozy tee, and many scientists work on oomycetes to understand them and try and fight them.

      Society has changed enough that it is unlikely that the uk would allow Ireland to suffer like that again. But there will always be crop diseases, and they may occur in poor countries who have no means of feeding themselves other ways.

      Scientists in norwich are trialling ways of using GM to treat these sorts of diseases. There are already successful potatoes made using GM that are resistant to blight – GM is so exciting and has endless possibilities in plant disease defence.

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