What Was The Human Societal Impact Of Potato Late Blight, Phytophthora Infestans, In Ireland? - Foodie Fitness - Food and Fitness

What Was The Human Societal Impact Of Potato Late Blight, Phytophthora Infestans, In Ireland
Significance – The potato late blight pathogen was introduced to Europe in the 1840s and caused the devastating loss of a staple crop, resulting in the Irish potato famine and subsequent diaspora. Research on this disease has engendered much debate, which in recent years has focused on whether the geographic origin of the pathogen is South America or central Mexico.

What was the effect of the potato blight on the Irish people?

Black ’47 : Ireland’s Great Famine and its after-effects Blog by Ambassador Daniel Mulhall, 3 December 2018 When I spoke at the Washington premiere of Black ’47, a new film set during the Great Famine of 1845-49, I decided to delve into the historical background to this 19 th century Irish trauma.

In preparation for my remarks, I spent some time reacquainting myself with an era I had not looked into seriously for quite a few years. This blog has been written with a view to highlighting for an Irish-American audience the significance of the Famine for Ireland – and for America. Ireland’s Great Famine may be a footnote in 19th century European history, but it is fundamental to an understanding of Ireland’s story.

What’s more, the Famine had important implications for American society and for this country’s emergence as the world’s leading economy in the period between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of World War 1. While there were many striking developments in Ireland throughout the 19 th century – Robert Emmet’s Rising of 1803, the achievement of Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the Repeal movement of the 1840s, the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, the emergence of the Fenians in the 1860s, the land war of the 1880s and the rise and fall of Charles Stewart Parnell between 1880 and 1891 – nothing came close to the Famine in terms of the scale of its short-term and long-term effects.

Its immediate impact was devastating.
It was the last incidence of mass hunger in the western world.
When potato blight made its appearance in Ireland in the second half of 1845, it caused a partial failure of the potato crop on which so many Irish people were dependent.
When the blight returned in 1846 with much more severe effects on the potato crop, this created an unparalleled food crisis that lasted four years and drove Ireland into a nightmare of hunger and disease.

It decimated Ireland’s population, which stood at about 8.5 million on the eve of the Famine. It is estimated that the Famine caused about 1 million deaths between 1845 and 1851 either from starvation or hunger-related disease. A further 1 million Irish people emigrated.

This meant that Ireland lost a quarter of its population during those terrible years.
The Famine’s impact was most severe in the west of Ireland where some counties lost more than 50 per cent of their population.
The Famine’s immediate impact in terms of mortality and population loss is clear.
The Famine’s longer-term economic and political effects require some interpretation.

The most consequential of these was mass emigration from Ireland, which persisted for decades after Black ’47. Indeed, it is only in recent decades that Ireland has experienced net immigration. This massive outflow of people had serious economic and social consequences.

What was the infamous role played by Phytophthora infestans in human history?

The genus Phytophthora has played a significant role in both human history and the history of plant pathology. During the 1840s, an “unknown agent” caused epidemics of late blight in potatoes in the United States and Europe, culminating in the famous Irish Potato Famine of 1845.

In Ireland, as a result of a combination of factors, the potato was the main source of nutrition for millions of people, and the crop losses led to the death of over a million people and caused another million to flee the country ( The History Place ).
At this time, the cause of plant diseases like late blight was not known, and the origin of the disease remains a subject of debate ( Abad & Abad, 1997 ).

The severity of this blight prompted a few scientists to delve deeper into finding the cause, leading to the origins of plant pathology as a science. Reverend Miles Joseph Berkeley became the main supporter of the “fungal theory” of late blight (1845) based on his observations of mold-covered infected potato leaves under the microscope.

What were the long term effects of the Irish Potato Famine?

EMIGRATION – A long-lasting consequence of the famine on Ireland was emigration. Although emigration from Ireland (especially to the United States) preceded the famine, it exploded as a social phenomenon during and after the famine years. It is estimated that at least 1.3 million people left Ireland between 1846 and 1852 — most to North America (∼700,000), Britain (∼400,000), and Australia.

Passage, especially to North America, was not easy. The mortality on so-called “coffin ships” ranged from 5% to 30% — usually due to infectious diseases. The degree of morbidity and debility associated with the transatlantic passage was also considerable. For example, at the arrival point of Grosse Isle, in Quebec, Canada, as many as 20,000 deaths from typhus and other fevers was recorded among arriving emigrants in 1847.

The effect of this emigration on the United States was profound. In last census (2011), almost 40 million Americans claimed Irish ethnicity. Many can trace their ancestry to the famine era from 1845–1852 when 300 Irish would disembark daily in New York.

By 1850, the United States had almost 1 million citizens of Irish origin, 43% of whom were born in Ireland; and the Irish comprised 43% of all foreign-born population of the US at that time.
New York City had the largest amount of Irish emigration; by 1855, 26% of the population in Manhattan was Irish.

Although initially unpopular (leading to substantial nativist activity in the mid-1850s), Irish immigration helped to give the United States a major resource needed to keep its economy expanding — new labor — and, over time, the Irish grew to be a highly accepted element of the American melting-pot.

Emigration became the norm in Ireland after the famine. It is estimated that the Irish Diaspora (descendants of those who emigrated from the island) worldwide is approximately 80 million people, about half of whom are in the US. Ireland has never fully recovered from the famine. Indeed, the population living on the island decreased with every census until the late 20 th century, and even now the population of the island is less than that in the mid-1840s.

We also have very little insight into the long-lasting effects — medical and psychologic — of the famine on those who survived; but modern experiences, such as seen in the survivors of the 1944 famine in the Netherlands, suggest they were likely to be profound and cross generations ( 2, 3 ).

What is Phytophthora infestans and how did it change us history?

eLife digest – Few crop failures have been as devastating as those caused by potato late blight in the 1840s. This disease is caused by a filamentous microbe called Phytophthora infestans, which spread from North America to Europe in 1845, leading to the Great Famine in Ireland and to severe crop losses in the rest of Europe.

Phytophthora is thought to have originated in the Toluca valley of Mexico, where many different strains evolve alongside wild potato relatives, but the exact strain that caused the Great Famine, and how it is related to modern strains of the pathogen, has remained a mystery.
Yoshida et al.
Have used a technique call ‘shotgun’ sequencing to map the genomes of 11 historical strains of P.

infestans and 15 modern strains. The historical strains were extracted from the leaves of potato and tomato plants that were collected in North America and Europe, including Ireland and Great Britain, from 1845 onwards and stored in herbaria for future research.

By comparing the genomes of the historical and modern samples, Yoshida et al.
Found that the historical strains all belonged to a single lineage that shows very little genetic diversity.
Previously it has been proposed that this lineage was the same as US-1, which was the dominant strain of potato blight in the world until the end of the 1970s, or that it was more closely related to modern strains than to US-1.

Yoshida et al. now rule out both of these possibilities and show that the lineage that caused the great famine, which they call HERB-1, is clearly distinct from US-1, although they are closely related, and they conclude that both HERB-1 and US-1 might have dispersed from a common ancestor that existed outside of Mexico in the early 1800s.

What was life like in Ireland during the potato famine?

Abstract – My great-grandfather, Rodger Cantwell, and his family managed to survive the Irish famine that began in 1845. Blending what family records we have with Kelly’s outstanding 2012 book about the era, the following is an historical fictional account of Rodger’s saga.

When the potato famine swept through Ireland in 1846, I was 30 and my wife, Mary (McDonald), 33. We lived in a small cabin valued at only 5 shillings, where I was one of 30 farm laborers on the estate of George Fawcett, Esq. in Toomyvara, Tipperary. At that time we had five children: Bridget (age 8), Thomas (7), Michael (4), Julia (2), and little Mary (1).

Because of a generation-long collapse in our living standards, we came to rely mainly on potato farming for our sustenance. A single acre of potatoes could yield up to 6 tons of food, enough to feed our family for the year. It had been raining a lot, even more than usual for Ireland.

In October 1845, almost overnight, a dense blue fog settled over our puddled potato fields.
An odor of decay permeated the air.
When the wind and rain died away, there was a terrible stillness.
The potato crop was ruined, destroyed (we learned later) by the fungus Phytophthora infestans,
Over especially the next 2 years, life was miserable.

We were always hungry and lost weight. England gave us some Indian corn and maize, but it was poorly ground and caused abdominal pain and diarrhea. In an effort to earn some money, I joined a public works labor force, sponsored by the British, building roads and digging ditches that seemed to have little purpose.

It did pay 10 pence per day (12 pence equals 1 shilling), almost double my salary as a potato farmer. By August 1846, many of my countrymen had joined me in this endeavor, as the labor force increased fivefold to 560,000. We tried planting potatoes again in 1846, but stalks and leaves of the potatoes were blackened, accompanied by a sickening stench, and within only 3 to 4 days the whole crop was obliterated.

Our family was very fortunate, somehow avoiding the pestilence (typhus, relapsing fever, dysentery, and scurvy) that many of our neighbors succumbed to. We narrowly avoided having to go to one of the area workhouses. The Irish Poor Land System resulted in building 130 such workhouses, with a total of 100,000 beds, but the British goal was bizarre: they wanted to make poverty so unendurable that we (its victims) would embrace the virtue of the “saved,” namely to be more industrious, self-reliant, and disciplined.

Hard to do, I’d say, when one is starving and out of work.
Many of the British took the attitude that the famine was God’s punishment toward a sinful people.
We Catholics (80% of our population but not in ruling authority like the Protestants) didn’t agree with this nonsense.
Despite the fact that many of us were starving, our country kept having to export foods to England—oats, bacon, eggs, butter, lard, pork, beef, and fresh salmon.

In return, Britain did open up soup kitchens for us, but of 2000 planned, only half were in operation in 1847.

How were the Irish treated when they came to America?

In this essay, Kevin Kenny examines a British political cartoon to raise questions about the transatlantic nature of anti-Irish prejudice and its relationship to the history of racism in America. What Was The Human Societal Impact Of Potato Late Blight, Phytophthora Infestans, In Ireland The Most Recently Discovered Wild Beast Source: Judy, or The London Serio-Comic Journal, August 3, 1881 “The Most Recently Discovered Wild Beast” (1881) is one of a series of nineteenth-century images portraying the Irish as violent and subhuman. In the U.S.

Survey I use images of this sort when examining the history of anti-immigrant prejudice and its relationship to American racism.
Native-born Americans criticized Irish immigrants for their poverty and manners, their supposed laziness and lack of discipline, their public drinking style, their catholic religion, and their capacity for criminality and collective violence.

in both words and pictures, critics of the Irish measured character by perceived physical appearance. Political cartoons such as the “Wild Beast” offered an exaggerated version of these complaints. The Irish-American “Dynamite Skunk,” clad in patriotic stars and stripes, has diabolical ears and feet and he sports an extraordinary tail.

Around his waist he is wearing an “infernal machine,” a terrorist bomb that was usually disguised as a harmless everyday object, in this case a book.
In the cage next to him, sketched in outline, is a second beast.
The Wild Beast image is especially interesting because it places American history in a transatlantic framework.

the cartoon comes from a British satirical magazine called Judy and is part of a transatlantic discourse of anti-Irish prejudice. It captures a significant moment in Irish and Irish-American history known as the “New Departure,” which briefly united the main elements of Irish social and political protest in a powerful transatlantic coalition.

The United States was home to some of the leading Irish nationalists and social reformers, including Patrick Ford, the editor of the Irish World, a radical New York newspaper subtitled “An American Advocate of Indiscriminate Murder” in this image.
Irish extremism, as the British saw it, was “Bred in the United States.” Although the Wild Beast is an Irish-American, he is being held captive in Britain, as indicated by the figure of the policeman.

The central action involves a girl held aloft to present the beast with a “Concession to Violence.” she represents the “Irish Land Bill,” a reform measure designed to defuse social tensions in Ireland. The nursemaid holding her aloft turns out to be Prime Minister William Gladstone, the chief supporter of the bill.

Is potato blight harmful to humans?

Saving Effected Foods to Eat – The good news: Late blight cannot infect humans, so depending on when you’re able to salvage your tomatoes or potatoes, they are safe to eat. If blight lesions are evident, you can simply cut those parts off the tomato or potato and use them as normal.

How did potato blight get to Ireland?

The Blight Begins The Famine began quite mysteriously in September 1845 as leaves on potato plants suddenly turned black and curled, then rotted, seemingly the result of a fog that had wafted across the fields of Ireland. The cause was actually an airborne fungus (phytophthora infestans) originally transported in the holds of ships traveling from North America to England.

Winds from southern England carried the fungus to the countryside around Dublin. The blight spread throughout the fields as fungal spores settled on the leaves of healthy potato plants, multiplied and were carried in the millions by cool breezes to surrounding plants. Under ideal moist conditions, a single infected potato plant could infect thousands more in just a few days.

The attacked plants fermented while providing the nourishment the fungus needed to live, emitting a nauseous stench as they blackened and withered in front of the disbelieving eyes of Irish peasants. There had been crop failures in the past due to weather and other diseases, but this strange new failure was unlike anything ever seen.

Potatoes dug out of the ground at first looked edible, but shriveled and rotted within days.
The potatoes had been attacked by the same fungus that had destroyed the plant leaves above ground.
By October 1845, news of the blight had reached London.
British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, quickly established a Scientific Commission to examine the problem.

After briefly studying the situation, the Commission issued a gloomy report that over half of Ireland’s potato crop might perish due to ‘wet rot.’ Meanwhile, the people of Ireland formulated their own unscientific theories on the cause of the blight. earth might have done it. Some Catholics viewed the crisis in religious terms as Divine punishment for the “sins of the people” while others saw it as Judgment against abusive landlords and middlemen. In England, religious-minded social reformers viewed the blight as a heaven-sent ‘blessing’ that would finally provide an opportunity to transform Ireland, ending the cycle of poverty resulting from the people’s mistaken dependence on the potato.

Can you eat potatoes with blight?

The final verdict on eating blighted potatoes – If your potato crop has been affected by blight, you can still eat the tubers, but keep some things in mind:

You’ll possibly get fewer and smaller tubers because the affected foliage didn’t allow them to grow to maturity;
Blight spores can trickle into the ground and affect your potato tubers, which will only show later, in storage;
Healthy potato tubers can get secondary infection with blight spores if you’re not careful during harvesting and you create lesions on their skins;
Blemishes caused by early blight are more forgiving and tend to heal when cured, compared to late blight, which can rot your entire crop of potatoes if you’re not vigilant.

Once you see your crop has been affected by blight, the best thing you can do is to use the tubers as soon as possible, as long as they don’t show obvious defects. Blight doesn’t cause tubers to rot immediately – it’s the weak secondary bacteria that causes potato tissue to break down in storage.

How did the famine changed Ireland?

Great Famine
Scene at Skibbereen during the Great Famine by Cork artist James Mahony, The Illustrated London News, 1847
Location	Ireland
Period	1845–1852
Total deaths	1 million
Observations	Policy failure, potato blight
Theory	Corn Laws, Gregory clause, Encumbered Estates’ Court, Crime and Outrage Bill (Ireland) 1847, Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, Three Fs, Poor Law Amendment Act
Relief	See below
Impact on demographics	Population fell by 20–25% due to death and emigration
Consequences	Permanent change in the country’s demographic, political, and cultural landscape
Website	See list of memorials to the Great Famine
Preceded by	Irish Famine (1740–1741) ( Bliain an Áir )
Succeeded by	Irish Famine, 1879 ( An Gorta Beag )

The Great Famine ( Irish : an Gorta Mór ), also known as the Great Hunger, the Famine (mostly within Ireland) or the Irish Potato Famine (mostly outside Ireland) was a period of mass starvation and disease in Ireland from 1845 to 1849, which constituted a historical social crisis which had a major impact on Irish society and history as a whole.

With the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was dominant, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as an Drochshaol, loosely translated as “the hard times” (or literally “the bad life”).
The worst year of the period was 1847, known as “Black ’47”.

During the Great Hunger, roughly a million people died and more than a million fled the country, causing the country’s population to fall by 20–25%, in some towns falling as much as 67% between 1841 and 1871. Between 1845 and 1855, no fewer than 2.1 million people left Ireland, primarily on packet ships but also steamboats and barque —one of the greatest exoduses from a single island in history. The proximate cause of the famine was a potato blight which infected potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, causing an additional 100,000 deaths outside Ireland and influencing much of the unrest in the widespread European Revolutions of 1848,

Which part of Ireland was most affected by the famine?

The famine did not affect all of Ireland in the same way. Suffering was most pronounced in western Ireland, particularly Connaught, and in the west of Munster. Leinster and especially Ulster escaped more lightly. The following map shows the severity of the famine across Ireland in 1847; the height of the Famine. There are a number of reasons for this pattern:

As discussed in Prelude to Famine 1: Irish Agriculture, there were several distinct kinds of agriculture present in Ireland at the time of the famine. The farmers in the east depended upon cereal crops, while those in Ulster grew flax. Only in the small farms of west of Ireland, and in parts of Munster, was the potato in a monopolistic position. It is estimated that at the eve of the famine 30% of Irish people were largely or wholly dependant on potatoes for their food. Thus, when the Blight struck it was these people who had nothing to fall back on. In Connaught some have estimated that as many as 25% of the population died. Those who lived nearer to large cities had more access to imported goods. Although food was exported as usual from Leinster in 1844 and 1845, there was a net import of almost a million tons of grain by 1847. However, these imports naturally reached those nearer to the cities and these are in the east and south. Dublin, Belfast and Derry escaped with almost no effects at all, while Cork and Wexford were relatively better off than their rural environs. It was the inland and especially the western areas that could benefit least from the food of the cities. Given the fact that potatoes are notoriously hard to transport in any case, it would be difficult to get potatoes to Connaught even in a non-famine situation. More people were killed by malnutrition-related diseases (such as dysentry and scurvy) as well as cholera that swept through the famine-ravaged countryside, than by actual starvation. While already prevalent in the west, many of these diseases spreads most effectively in damp conditions where people live closely together. Dysentry is not caused by hunger, and its incidence was not significantly higher during the famine as before. However, recovery from Dysentry depends upon good nutrition and in many cases this was unavailable. The Cholera epidemic was coindicental to the famine, but was responsible for a large number of deaths. It was the closely packed west that suffered most from these effects.

Note: While this explains the pattern of suffering, the reasons for the severity of the suffering is an entirely different issue. See later chapters. > Next > The Famine 3: Peel’s Relief Programme to July 1846 > Sources:

Professor Kevin Whelan, writing in the “Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape”, Cork University Press, 1997. “Seventh Report of the Relief Commissioners”, London, 1847, (Appendix)

How did the Irish Potato Famine affect America?

Irish Immigrants to the United States – The Irish Famine caused the first mass migration of Irish people to the United States. The effects of the Irish Potato Famine continued to spur on Irish immigration well into the 20th century after the devastating fungus that destroyed Ireland’s prized potato crops died out in 1850. What Was The Human Societal Impact Of Potato Late Blight, Phytophthora Infestans, In Ireland

Why did the Irish starve during the potato famine?

The Great Famine was caused by a failure of the potato crop, which many people relied on for most of their nutrition. A disease called late blight destroyed the leaves and edible roots of the potato plants in successive years from 1845 to 1849.

How the Irish potato famine was solved?

Scientists have long known that it was a strain of Phytophthora infestans (or P. infestans ) that caused the widespread devastation of potato crops in Ireland and northern Europe beginning in 1845, leading to the Irish Potato Famine,P. infestans infects the plant through its leaves, leaving behind shriveled, inedible tubers.

The most likely culprit, they believed, was a strain known as US-1, which even today is responsible for billions of dollars of crop damage each year. To solve the mystery, molecular biologists from the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States examined DNA extracted from nearly a dozen botanical specimens dating back as far as 1845 and held in museum collections in the UK and Germany, which were then sent to the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, England.

After sequencing the genome of the 19th century samples and comparing them with modern blights, including US-1, they were able to trace the genetic evolution of P. infestans around the world and across centuries. The researchers concluded that it wasn’t in fact US-1 that caused the blight, but a previously unknown strain, HERB-1, which had originated in the Americas (most likely in Mexico’s Toluca Valley) sometime in the early 19th century before spreading to Europe in the 1840s.

Who helped Ireland during the Famine?

India – raised donations all over the country It was one of the major countries that helped Ireland during the Famine. With a committee made up of British, Irish, and Indian members, together they raised donations from people all over India.

Did the Irish survive on potatoes?

The Irish Potato Famine is an event in history that underscores the importance of not only understanding biology, but what can happen when countries are inhuman to each other. The Irish Potato Famine is, just as its name suggests, a famine caused by the sudden decimation of the potato crop in Ireland which began in 1845 and lasted until about 1860. The potato ( Solanum tuberosum L.) has its origins in South America. Incans grew, ate, and even buried them with potatoes with their dead. However, they did not exist in Ireland until 1589 when British explorer Sir Walter Raleigh brought them back from South America and planted them at his estate in Ireland at Myrtle Grove, Youghal.

Legend has it that Sir Raleigh made the potato a gift to Queen Elizabeth I, and she in turn hosted a royal banquet which featured the potato in every course of the meal.
Unfortunately, the cooks didnt have experience with the potatoes and threw out the tubers (what we eat and usually picture a potato as being) while they kept and cooked the leaves and stems (Stradley 2004).

As with other members of the family Solanaceae such as nightshade, the leaves are stems are poisonous (Volk 2001). The royal banquet attendees became deathly ill, and as a result, the potato was banned from further use (Stradley 2004). Beginning as early as the 5th century, the Irish and British had many conflicts, which eventually led to the Irish being subjected to the whims of the British (Handelsman 2000).

What happened to the Irish people between the years of 1845 and 1849?

Great Famine
Period	1845–1852
Total deaths	1 million
Observations	Policy failure, potato blight

Why were the Irish so dependent on potatoes?

For a long time Ireland was sparsely populated, and it was only with the discovery of potatoes that they could grow enough food to allow for significant population growth, as potatoes could grow on harsh terrain that was unsuitable for other crops such as wheat or barley.

How did Ireland get rid of the blight?

In September 1845 a strange disease struck the potatoes as they grew in fields across Ireland. Many of the potatoes were found to have gone black and rotten and their leaves had withered. In the harvest of 1845, between one-third and half of the potato crop was destroyed by the strange disease, which became known as ‘potato blight’.

It was not possible to eat the blighted potatoes, and the rest of 1845 was a period of hardship, although not starvation, for those who depended on it. The price of potatoes more than doubled over the winter: a hundredweight of potatoes rose in price from 16p to 36p. It is now known that the same potato blight struck in the USA in 1843 and 1844 and in Canada in 1844.

It is thought that the disease travelled to Europe on trade ships and spread to England and finally to Ireland, striking the south-east first. The picture on the left shows what a blighted potato looks like. They have a soggy consistency and smell badly. Note that this picture was taken recently, showing that potato blight still attacks sometimes today. The following spring, people planted even more potatoes.

The farmers thought that the blight was a one-off and that they would not have to suffer the same hardship in the next winter. However, by the time harvest had come in Autumn (Fall) 1846, almost the entire crop had been wiped out. A Priest in Galway wrote ” As to the potatoes they are all gone – clean gone.

If travelling by night, you would know when a potato field was near by the smell. The fields present a space of withered black stalks. ” The Prime-Minister, Sir Robert Peel, set up a commission of enquiry to try to find out what was causing the potato failures and to suggest ways of preserving good potatoes.

The commission was headed by two English scientists, John Lindley and Lyon Playfair. The farmers had already found that blight thrived in damp weather, and the commission concluded that it was being caused by a form of wet rot. The scientists were unable, however, to find anything with which to stop the spread of the blight.

It was in 1846 that the first starvations started to happen. In 1847, the harvest improved somewhat and the potato crop was partially successful. However, there was a relapse in 1848 and 1849 causing a second period of famine. In this period, disease was spreading which, in the end, killed more people than starvation did.

The worst period of disease was 1849 when Cholera struck. Those worst affected were the very young and very old. In 1850 the harvest was better and after that the blight never struck on the same scale again. The precise number of people who died is perhaps the most keenly studied aspect of the famine: unfortunately, this is often for political rather than historical reasons.

The only hard data that has survived is the 1841 and 1851 censuses, but the accuracy of these has been questioned. The reason for this is that the censuses recorded deaths by asking how many family members died in the past 10 years, but after the famine whole families had often left Ireland thus leaving many deaths unreported.